Airplane food is a subject of little glory, normally fodder for comedy routines and small talk. But acclaimed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights takes it, and the other small indignities of travel, as a matter of deep philosophical importance. Flights, which was translated into English by Jennifer Croft, focuses on the mundane ways we express our humanity while we’re en route somewhere, and, fittingly, includes long paragraphs on travel-sized shampoo, redeye layovers, and hotel pay-per-view pornography. Tokarczuk’s approach is precise: every detail, from flight times to the labels on

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the word “honky-tonk” dates to 1899, in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette. “A petition to the council is being circulated for signatures, asking that the Honky Tonk theater on Main Street be reopened,” read the Texas newspaper. From its first appearance in print, the honky-tonk was already under threat of closure. It’s possible that the theater on Main Street was a different kind of establishment, but the term is now universally used to describe a roadside bar where country music can be heard, either played by musicians or on

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.

Richard Powers’s latest novel seems like a response to Ghosh’s call for serious fiction of

The artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was an outsider, autodidact, and key figure in the East Village art scene in the 1980s. He died of aids in 1992, after a life of creating explicit, beautiful artwork in opposition to the savage, censorious Right. He saw America as the site of a mass slaughter, a land of violent xenophobes trying to create “a one tribe nation.” His work, often called transgressive, is in fact transcendent, full of love and grace and rage, and anarchist at its core. David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art/Yale University Press, $