Books and Ideas

How Jayson Greene Wrote One of the Year’s Most Affecting Memoirs

How Jayson Greene Wrote One of the Year’s Most Affecting Memoirs How Jayson Greene Wrote One of the Year’s Most Affecting Memoirs

Once More We Saw Stars, which follows his family after the death of his daughter Greta, is at once an elegy, a raw outcry of rage, and a meditation on relearning to live and work i...

May 2, 2019 / Nathan Goldman

Carlos Bulosan’s 1946 Novel About Filipino Migrant Workers Is Still Groundbreaking

Carlos Bulosan’s 1946 Novel About Filipino Migrant Workers Is Still Groundbreaking Carlos Bulosan’s 1946 Novel About Filipino Migrant Workers Is Still Groundbreaking

When we read a book like America Is in the Heart, we have the chance to be not just readers of American history’s horrors, but its witnesses and inheritors.

May 1, 2019 / Elaine Castillo

Saidiya Hartman’s Astounding History of the Forgotten Sexual Modernists in 20th-Century Black Life

Saidiya Hartman’s Astounding History of the Forgotten Sexual Modernists in 20th-Century Black Life Saidiya Hartman’s Astounding History of the Forgotten Sexual Modernists in 20th-Century Black Life

In her new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she looks at everyday life for urban black women and in the process pioneers a stirring new way to write history.

May 1, 2019 / Sam Huber

Tom Tomorrow cartoon

Ilhan Omar vs. the Outrage Machine Ilhan Omar vs. the Outrage Machine

No observation goes unpunished.

Apr 30, 2019 / Tom Tomorrow

Comic Book Catharsis: A Q&A With Brian Fies on His Powerful Graphic Novel About California Wildfires

Comic Book Catharsis: A Q&A With Brian Fies on His Powerful Graphic Novel About California Wildfires Comic Book Catharsis: A Q&A With Brian Fies on His Powerful Graphic Novel About California Wildfires

His new memoir, A Fire Story, details what happened when the Tubbs Fire turned his and his neighbors’ lives upside down.

Apr 26, 2019 / Elena Goukassian

Eric Hobsbawm

Chronicling the Age of Hobsbawm: A Q&A With Historian Richard Evans Chronicling the Age of Hobsbawm: A Q&A With Historian Richard Evans

“The more I have read his writings, the more I have come to admire and respect him not just as an historian but as a person.”

Apr 26, 2019 / Sebastiaan Faber

Migrant State of Mind: A Q&A With Novelist Laila Lalami

Migrant State of Mind: A Q&A With Novelist Laila Lalami Migrant State of Mind: A Q&A With Novelist Laila Lalami

Her new novel, The Other Americans, looks at the life of an immigrant family in a small town in the Mojave.

Apr 23, 2019 / Nawal Arjini

Maurice Carlos Ruffin Confronts the Horror and Spectacle of Racism

Maurice Carlos Ruffin Confronts the Horror and Spectacle of Racism Maurice Carlos Ruffin Confronts the Horror and Spectacle of Racism

His debut novel, We Cast a Shadow, is among a series of recent works that pair analysis of race with grim, fantastical tales of metamorphosis.

Apr 23, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Stephen Kearse

Tom Tomorrow cartoon

No Collusion for Old Men No Collusion for Old Men

Trump gets a pass, and a pass, and a pass…

Apr 23, 2019 / Tom Tomorrow

Harmony Korine’s Boomer Fable

Harmony Korine’s Boomer Fable Harmony Korine’s Boomer Fable

The Beach Bum, starring Matthew McConaughey, is all about excess, anarchy, and baby boomers.

Apr 22, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Erin Schwartz

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