“She was always afraid of my voice. That was the defining factor of our relationship — fear of what I would say and write and do. She’s afraid of … the narrative that I possess.”

To understand what the Golden State is compared to what it was, one solitary hiker follows the trail of the first overland Spanish expedition into California 250 years later.

Sara Fredman talks to author Lindy West on women and likability, the evolution of pop culture, and navigating conversations in a complex, messy world. 

Jaquira Díaz witnesses her father’s rebellious fight for a better life, and her homeland’s fight for its place in the world.

Edited by Toni Morrison, the 1983 novel ‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones was supposed to set the literary world on fire. It didn’t.

Cinelle Barnes considers how the chaos and discipline of dance kept the disparate parts of her being stitched together.

“I could see the ghosts,” recalled Lafcadio Hearn about his early childhood. Late in life, he became a celebrated chronicler of Japan’s folk tales: stories of strange demons and lingering visitations.

What does environmental justice look like in a landscape overrun by prisons? Where the incarcerated suffer from unusually polluted surroundings, and prisons are a toxin in their own right?

“I wasn’t unified in my being. I wasn’t able to bring my whole self to the table,” says Cameron Dezen Hammon about her life as a worship leader for an evangelical megachurch.

Loved and loathed in equal measure, one thing critics can’t take from this influential 90s band is their willingness to evolve musically.

Steph Cha discusses her new novel “Your House Will Pay,” the LA Riots, the Korean American Angeleno community, her 3,600 Yelp reviews, and pushing back against gatekeepers in publishing.

Andrea J. Buchanan contemplates the way illness and pain can freeze a sufferer in time, as if encased in glass.

This month’s books newsletter is suspended in a state of anticipation.

Rebecca Traister asks how NBC can possibly change its misogynist culture if it keeps the same bad actors at the top.

“If you have the depth, the surface can be as light as it’s possible to make it…I don’t mind that ‘Swimming Home’ is sometimes described as a ‘beach read’ — actually that’s a triumph.”

Marc Hamer discusses life, death, and the lost art of catching a mole.

While away at summer camp, Melissa Febos discovers the power of her generation’s rage and feminism.

In “Coventry,” Rachel Cusk draws a connection between politeness and narrative death, rudeness and tragedy, storytelling and war.

We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process.

For one brown, queer Filipino-American, Karen Carpenters’ music anchored her to her musical family’s past while helping chart her path in their adopted Southern California.

Trying to form some connection to the father who abandoned him, an outdoorsman surfs the California beach where his father grew up, while looking for answers in the autobiography his father left behind.

In an clandestinely written memoir, a jailed Turkish novelist and political dissident remembers the single sentence that changed everything at the moment of his arrest.

Cameron Dezen Hammon reflects on her frustrations as a Christian music minister for the terminally ill, unable to heal a cancer patient she cared for, and struggling to be compassionate at her belligerent Jewish father’s bedside.

“When I look at that dress and how much intention went into the making of it…it’s like we want to have something that can’t be destroyed, because so much of the past has been destroyed…”

Historian Amir Alexander on Euclidean geometry’s far-reaching effects.

Nell Zink, Joy Williams, and a different kind of climate skepticism.

In her debut memoir, Sarah Broom builds her “obsession” with her family home — destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina — into a story of how families decide who they are, how they got here, and how they reconstruct themselves over and over again.

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestseller is deeply rooted in a specific, Gen-X cultural moment. Can it still speak to us in 2019?

When attempting to write a review of the official Susan Sontag biography, our reviewer finds himself on shaky ground after learning new information about the author.

This month’s books newsletter is a bodily affair.