While envisioning the darkest of futures and grappling with mortality, the English writer retreated to an idyllic Scottish isle to write Nineteen Eighty-Four.

More of this sort of thing, thanks.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine talks about her new short story collection “Sabrina & Corina,” her obsession with dualities, and Chicano and Indigenous history in Denver.

In Esmé Weijun Wang’s book of personal essays, “The Collected Schizophrenias,” it’s the reader, not the writer, who is an unreliable narrator.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston gave Langston Hughes a lift to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie.” It was one of most fortuitous hangouts in literary history.

In “An American Summer,” journalist Alex Kotlowitz tries to report on gun deaths on Chicago’s South Side with the same attention to survivors, anniversaries, and aftershocks that is paid to mass shootings.

After his parents pushed him out of their home, a teenager descended into the drug-fueled counterculture of the 1970s American West.

Of all the genes parents pass down and values they instill, how does one take hold so much stronger than the others?

A French-Iranian journalist writes a letter to her grandfather about the ten years she spent in Iran, trying to make sense of her identity and a country living very different public and private lives.

Nathan Englander talks about the “super-American world” of Orthodox Judaism, Philip Roth’s funeral, and training himself to write his new novel “kaddish.com” while daydreaming.

“I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”

Mira Jacob talks about why she wrote a graphic memoir, and why she is tired of performing her pain in order to help white people understand racism.

In 1935, a group of New York communists boarded a German luxury liner during a lavish sending-off party attended by celebrities, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Their goal: capture the swastika.

“The books from ‘Trainspotting’ onwards have been about deindustrialization … the cruel existential panic that we feel, in the sense that we don’t really know what we’re here for anymore.”

Summer Brennan talks about femininity and suffering, beauty and biology, and the startlingly dark turn she found herself taking when writing about women and power in her new book ‘High Heel.’

“The whiteboy said there was nothing left for me in Houston, he said that I didn’t have to punish myself, and he said my name, my actual name.”

Remaking itself from a little leftie newspaper to a powerhouse of internet journalism required experimentation, transparency, and embracing uncertainty.

Some places are as haunted as our pasts.

America binged on expansion, relying on land grabs as an engine of growth and a way to externalize racial hatred. Historian Greg Grandin asks, without a frontier, what can America be?

Journalist Will Hunt, who made the crossing with a group of urban explorers, recounts being menaced by rainwater and rats — and meeting fellow subterranean wanderers along the way.

This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about pasts and futures, and how lineages stretch across time.

“The idea seems to be that we all live in the great database in the sky, occasionally summoning aliens with our minds.” Emily Harnett explores Silicon Valley’s appropriation of UFO culture.

According to primatologist Frans de Waal, we don’t like to admit that animals, especially apes, have emotions just like ours, and science has become better at studying apes’ behaviors than human ones.

True crime’s massive gender gap (95% of murderers are male) isn’t really one that needs fixing. And yet, since the beginning, a steadfast minority of Ripperologists have argued that Jack was really Jill.

Daniel Immerwahr says studying the history of the Greater United States opens our eyes to how “racism has shaped the actual country itself. The legal borders of the country, but also the borders of the heart.”

Dror Burstein’s “Muck” sets a difficult course through themes of power, pita bread, and invasion, mixing up the biblical past and the just-as-lamentable present.

“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”

In an excerpt from her memoir, T Kira Madden recalls a harrowing adventure with her parents.

In this land of constant reinvention, a longtime resident walks the streets to understand what the city was and what it’s becoming.

When a refugee flees to another country and claims asylum, she is, in effect, petitioning the state to listen to her story.