This month’s books newsletter is jam-packed with scammers, censors, and … other books.
Books
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
If You Were a Sack of Cumin
In the midst of the Syrian Civil War, three grown siblings attempt to fulfill their father’s final wish. The journey is dangerous, but that’s no surprise; nowadays, death is always hard work.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘Archive, Archive, Archive’: Valeria Luiselli on Reading In Order To Write
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.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Joe Scapellato on “The Made-Up Man” and the Myth of the Self
In Scapellato’s new novel, a man is pulled into a noir detective mystery he doesn’t want to solve.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
In Defense of Schadenfreude
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
Writing for the Movies: A Letter from Hollywood, 1962
In this classic essay about a classic American art form, legendary screenwriter Daniel Fuchs reflects on his lifetime learning the trade.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Believe That Silence Is Ineffective’: Devi S. Laskar on Invisibility and American Terror
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?
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
To Compromise With the Facts of Living
In Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel “Bowlaway,” the past and future are mysteriously entangled.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story, Writing
Stalin’s Scheherazade
An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.
Posted inBooks, Culture, Feature, History, Profiles & Interviews, Story
The Precarity of Everything: On Millennial (Blacks and) Blues
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.