For nearly as long as I’ve been a reader, I’ve sought out books about/by people who were preoccupied by ideas about how and where we belong. At first, I used to look for stories with characters who felt they didn’t belong in the same ways that I felt I
About a year ago, I was reading Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1945) and it was such a gush of words that it was almost intoxicating; I found myself ordering a copy of The Man Who Loved Children (an earlier novel, perhaps her best-known overseas, in which I’d stalled
Joe Sacco’s Journalism (2012) is a longtime resident of my TBR; I was reminded of it because of his Footnotes in Gaza and Palestine. This, however, is a fabulous introduction to his work, divided into six sections: The Hague, The Palestinian Territories, The Caucasus, Iraq, Migration, and India. Most
Just when my thoughts were etching a loop as I struggled to describe Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I came across this Joy Williams quotation*: “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” That is, indeed,
Many people think of following the news as a responsibility, but this contrasting idea gave me pause, expressed in Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (2025). Because priorities shift, during wartime, when your daily life is what other people are consuming as news—on their phones while waiting in line
