To write “Lost Children Archive,” Valeria Luiselli studied the refugee crisis “obliquely,” reading about other historical moments of children’s mass displacement, amassing a reader’s archive of loss.

In Scapellato’s new novel, a man is pulled into a noir detective mystery he doesn’t want to solve.

Historian Tiffany Watt Smith argues that schadenfreude, the joy we derive from another’s misfortune, is just a natural part of the very complex emotional responses we have as human beings.

In this classic essay about a classic American art form, legendary screenwriter Daniel Fuchs reflects on his lifetime learning the trade.

Laskar’s debut novel imagines an alternate ending to an incident from her real life: When law enforcement agents raided her home, and confiscated her unfinished novel, what if she had refused to comply?

In Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel “Bowlaway,” the past and future are mysteriously entangled.

An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.

Reniqua Allen — the author of It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America — on Black millennials, millennial burnout, and hope in a time of uncertainty.

Man Booker winner Marlon James immersed himself in African myths and history, so he could use that world as a springboard for a new fantasy series.

A declaration of dependence, excerpted from Briallen Hopper’s new essay collection.

Reema Zaman on deciding she would no longer live to please men, and how women’s self-esteem and self-love is a revolutionary act of dissent.

A Tribe Called Quest’s pioneering music is one of many filaments that connects Americans of color with each other now and back through time.

“My father is dead, I said to myself, my father is dead. Again and again I said it, and still I failed to grasp what it meant.”

In a new memoir, novelist Bridgett M. Davis reveals that her mother was a Numbers operator in Detroit from the 1960s through the 1980s.

The encyclopedists’ plan to catalog knowledge seemed harmless enough. But what they intended was far more subversive: to restructure knowledge itself.

When asked if there was “anything people don’t understand” about him, Gorey responded: “Yes. No. Yes. No.” A new biography by Mark Dery attempts to sort myth from reality.

Pam Houston’s new memoir is an ode to her beloved ranch, but also deals directly with the harrowing moments of childhood abuse that her fictional characters have been living through for years.

Esmé Weijun Wang discovers a new interpretation of faith while on two kindred pilgrimages: one to find an accurate medical diagnosis, one to a sacred site in New Mexico.

“The phrase ‘pull out all the stops’ comes from the organ; it’s fortunate for listeners’ eardrums that organists never do this.”

Climate change and the border wall are more connected than you might think.

In an excerpt from her debut memoir, Stephanie Land recalls being poor, and moving with her young daughter from a homeless shelter to transitional housing.

“Our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. Our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”

“The prevalent perception of black women as unruly bodies and incompetent caretakers overrules even the most dominant stereotype about us—namely, that we are superhuman.”

This month’s books newsletter is all about things. As in stuff, objects. Because, as Heike Geissler says, “It’s because of all the things that are here… that you’re here in the first place.”

“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”

At an art exhibit exploring black models through Western art, Morgan Jerkins finds historical evidence of the white supremacist definitions of beauty Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom identifies in ‘Thick: and Other Essays.’

Women who spoke too angrily or too publicly were punished in cruel and unusual ways.

A trip to a Swedish stone-age burial site gives an archaeologist too close a look at death.

“On top of all that, some of us fight holes in our souls that a boxcar of donuts couldn’t fill.” Tommy Tomlinson shares the physical and emotional costs of weighing 460 pounds.

Tessa Hadley on gaining the sense of authority she needed to write fiction, the authors whose work opens the door for her to write, and the way we are formed by our connections with other people.