Valeria Luiselli began volunteering as a translator for children in immigration court around five years ago. Drawing on that work, and the activism that followed, she wrote two books: Tell Me How It Ends, an extended essay based on the questionnaire used to interview the children, and her latest, Lost Children Archive (Knopf, $28), a novel about a family traveling by car from New York City to Arizona so that the father, an audio documentarian, can work on a project about the Chiricahua Apache. During the trip, the mother becomes obsessed with news on the radio of migrant children being deported

In 2012, the British author Geoff Dyer published Zona, an eccentric volume on Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s vaunted 1979 film. Dyer’s Zona moves with pronounced energy between close readings and carefree riffs. Dyer’s new book, ‘Broadsword Calling Danny Boy’—just out from Pantheon—marks the writer’s second crack at book-length movie criticism. Slimmer than Zona, 'Broadsword Calling Danny Boy' offers a gleeful report on Where Eagles Dare (1968), Brian G. Hutton’s World War II entertainment about a pack of Allied soldiers (led by Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood) attempting to retrieve an American

Leah Dieterich’s Vanishing Twins is more than a memoir about love and marriage. It’s a literary experiment in both structure and subject, a novel mix of theory and story. The book examines Dieterich’s marriage to Eric, a man she met in college. When they first got together, they formed an unusually close partnership, creating a private world that felt both thrilling and stifling (as Dieterich notes, they had never spent more than a night apart). Eventually, this dynamic became overwhelming to her, and the couple decided to experiment with non-monogamy. Dieterich narrates the ensuing adventures,

Anyone familiar with Sam Lipsyte's work knows to expect somersaults of sentences, language twisted line after line into laugh-inducing poses. In his new novel, Hark, those poses have names: “Ithaka, Persian Rain, Moonlight Diana Number Three, Wheel of Tartars.” But this isn't pilates—it’s a form of self-actualization called “mental archery,” propagated by a man named Hark Morner. The book is more than the story of Hark’s followers—it's an expansive look at the search for meaning and progress in a crumbling world, full of ineffectual leaders and full of itself. It would be easy to call Lipsyte's

One of our most unerring critics, A. S. Hamrah is a soothsayer, a sidesplitter, a crank, and a moralist. His reviews linger wherever his attention is drawn, whether on or off screen: in the prosthetic hand worn by Jessica Biel over a prop stump for a shlocktale about American veterans, he presents a withering metaphor for Hollywood’s political cowardice; a missed screening prompts him to write an unmissable tale about the indignities weathered by reviewers. He has previewed films he will not see, and covered others without once mentioning character, plot, or star.

With his collection The

The writer, translator, and poet John Keene has long married a daringly experimental style with a commitment to stories that are usually omitted by history’s ellipses. It’s an approach tangible in his work as a translator, where Keene has long expounded the need for English editions of black diasporic authors (coining, in his essay “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness,” the hashtag #NonAnglophoneNarrativesStoriesPoemsandOtherFormsofExpressionofBlackLivesMatter); as well as in his fiction, from his 1995 debut Annotations, a black, queer bildungsroman-turned-fugue of semi-autobiographical

“The Midwest is a somewhat slippery notion,” Meghan O’Gieblyn writes in her debut essay collection, Interior States. “It is a region whose existence—whose very name—has always been contingent upon the more fixed and concrete notion of the West. . . . It’s difficult to live here without developing an existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still.”

As a lifelong Midwesterner, O’Gieblyn’s personal existential dizziness is compounded by the loss of her faith. Raised in an evangelical Christian family, O’Gieblyn studied at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago

Sarah Schulman is a native New Yorker, an activist, and, although I'm not sure she would apply the label to herself, a profound philosopher on social relations. All of these streams flow into her recent novel Maggie Terry, a literary detective story about a former NYPD officer struggling with addiction, a tough case, and her ex-partner's theft of her daughter. In a compressed time frame of a few days, Maggie, fresh out of rehab, both loses and finds her place in the new New York. I spoke to Schulman about Maggie Terry and her other work by phone on a Saturday afternoon, me in Los Angeles,

Over the span of thirty-two years, Deborah Eisenberg has produced five short-fiction collections, each more emotionally thoughtful and rigorous than the last. Like her past work, Eisenberg’s newest collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, requires not just a reader’s utmost attention, but also a willingness to be vulnerable and receptive. Rather than concern themselves with plot in an obvious way, the stories tend to chase abstract questions and explore how time impacts those pursuits. In "Taj Mahal," a group of actors reflect on a tell-all about their colleague, with each character remembering both

At first, it might be hard to see the connection between the ten critics profiled in Michelle Dean’s Sharp. Writers such as Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Janet Malcolm, and Nora Ephron were singular talents—each an uneasy fit for any neat label. What links them, Dean writes, was that they were “sharp”—the word was often used as an insult—and possessed a keen critical facility that was underappreciated at the time but has become extremely influential. Dean’s book is an alternative to the usual, single-subject biography, which often considered “these women in isolation,

In the autobiographical essays that make up her debut collection, Tonight I’m Someone Else, Chelsea Hodson examines the chaotic and bewildering experience of being an American woman and artist. At first glance, some essays resemble a well-curated Twitter feed—like the single-line, stream-of-consciousness observations found in “The End of Longing”—but Hodson offers much more than aphoristic quips: She delves deeply into themes such as longing, desire, performance, and voyeurism. Her fragmentary, self-aware style evokes recent works by Sarah Manguso, Jenny Offill, and Maggie Nelson, yet her

Keith Gessen’s timely and hilarious new novel, A Terrible Country, arrives ten years after his first, All the Sad Young Literary Men. The story follows Andrei Kaplan, an overeducated, underemployed young academic as he relocates to Moscow to look after his sick grandmother in the summer of 2008. Over the course of the year, Andrei cares for his grandmother, plays hockey, befriends revolutionaries, and falls in love. I spoke with Gessen on a hot summer afternoon in the Greene Acres Community Garden in Brooklyn in the presence of many mosquitos and at least one cooped chicken.

Was there a