The term “hermit crab essay,” coined in 2003 by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their book Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, refers to essays that take the form of something un-essay-like—such as a recipe, how-to manual, or m

Whatever you do, don’t call Nicola Griffith’s new novel “inspiring.” Though Mara Tagarelli, the protagonist of So Lucky (MCD x FSG Originals, May 2018), has multiple sclerosis, the book refuses to stoop to “inspiration porn.” Mara—the hot-tempered he

The skin on the bottoms of my feet is so hard that I have felt a dull ache somewhere in my heel after running miles barefoot on the beach; not until I pull my foot up on my knee do I realize that a small, sharp shell has dug in and stuck inside the c

I have a deep bond with the literature that was recommended to me by the man I used to love. Some of the books he passed along I rejected out of hand—books such as Never Let Me Go and The Cement Garden and Child of God. Knee-jerk reactions to literat

Tara Westover’s memoir Educated traces her evolution from the youngest child of seven in an Idaho family of Mormon fundamentalists to a cosmopolitan scholar of history in London. Through grit and bootstrapping, she leaves behind her homesteading, uns

Though she has published about as many books of fiction as she has memoir, Michelle Tea is probably best known for writing about her own life. This is due in part to the fact that even some of her fictional characters—in particular, the writer charac

When I was growing up in Florida, we called it God’s Waiting Room, but not because we thought it was heavenly. The elderly retired in Florida, “waiting” for death, and we kids who joked about it were waiting, too. Not for death, but to leave for olde

Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in June. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes “I wanted to have my form and explode it too,” said Wanda Coleman of sonnets. Hayes names her with gratitude in this book. Ath

I first met Adrienne Celt at the Tucson Festival of Books, where, after watching her befriend a macaw, I knew I needed to know her better. We’d both written novels involving family secrets and the same Slavic folklore. The Daughters went on to win th

When Pablo Neruda was expelled from France in 1952, he wrote this to his beloved countrymen in Chile: “The future of humanity may be endangered in the hands of a few evil men, but it does not belong to them. The future of man is ours, because we are

This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older. 1. In our current moment, a chorus of “nasty women” has flooded social media with grievances. Unfortu

The winner of the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize and the Baileys Prize) will be announced on June 6. Since 1996, the award has recognized the best English-language novel by a woman published in the U.K. in the previous year

We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around).  Here’s what we’re looking out for this mon

The 11th annual Best Translated Book Awards were announced this evening at the New York Rights Fair. The Invented Part by  Rodrigo Fresán, translated by Will Vanderhyden, won for fiction. Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo, translated by Karen Emmerich,

On April 16, 2018, Junot Díaz came forward in a daring New Yorker piece sharing his story as a survivor of childhood sexual assault. Fast-forward to May 4—Díaz appears once more in newspapers, this time in the New York Times, as the subject of accusa

Helen DeWitt’s great subject is genius, an ambitious undertaking made less so by the fact that she may just be one herself. DeWitt is less concerned with the nature of genius, or if such a thing even exists—in her fiction, it undoubtedly does—than sh

What I remember, and miss now, being out of that stage of the writing process, was the feeling of something being unlocked. It was always a little beyond language, just a sense of possibility, a door opening in my brain after I’d been hitting a wall.

“We prayed in Arabic everyday,” the poet Kaveh Akbar once wrote, “a language nobody in my family spoke.” His family spoke Farsi and English. Prayer, then, was a transformation: “From an early age, I was saying this mellifluous, charged language that

Al Alvarez, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and others remember Philip Roth, the creator of iconic characters Portnoy and Nathan Zuckerman. 1. Intense [University of Chicago English professor Joan Bennett] invited us to tea to meet one of her studen

1. Lifting the Heavens Only after drafting my bus book Riding the Wheel did I recall Annie Dillard’s advice in The Writing Life: “It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.” Instead, I had followed her first chapter’s first sentence:

In The Female Persuasion (Random House, April 3), Meg Wolitzer writes her protagonist, Greer Kadetsky, into a moment of confusing sexual assault. After Darren Tinzler reaches out and twists Greer’s breast during a conversation at a frat party, Greer

The third and last installment of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy opens on familiar ground—in the air, where the first book began. Again our narrator Faye finds herself seated next to a man. He’s just as chatty as the first guy (as if any of her

Jamel Brinkley’s nuanced debut A Lucky Man collects nine short stories set in places the author knows very intimately: Brooklyn and the Bronx. The writer grew up in these diverse neighborhoods and years later immersed himself in the lives of men and

Recently, in a networking group I’m part of, a woman posted in a panic. She was about to publish her first book with a small press, and she was lost. She didn’t know which way to turn, what to do next. She couldn’t stop wishing she was on the best-of

An old family friend died recently, someone I’d known all my life. She was there when I was born, full of stories of my little girlhood when, for a time, I was the only child among them—my parents, their closest friends. They lived two blocks from ea

In both Rumaan Alam’s second novel, That Kind of Mother, and Sheila Heti’s third, Motherhood, the functions and symbols associated with mothering—along with the ambivalence that can come with it—are conveyed with an authenticity that feels akin to re

In March, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi became a 2018 recipient of the $165,000 Windham Campbell Prize, one of the world’s most generous writing awards. Five years ago, when the Ugandan-born author completed her doctoral thesis, the novel Kintu, at the