Adam Shatz and I met recently to speak about his latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $32). Fanon was a psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist. Born in Martinique in 1925, he trained as a psychiatrist in France before he became the director of a psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria. There, he began to work with the National Liberation Front (FLN) and later went into exile in Tunisia. Fanon died at the age of thirty-six in Bethesda, Maryland, after receiving delayed treatment for leukemia at the National Institutes of Health—arranged for by the CIA.

ANGELO HERNANDEZ-SIAS: A funny story about the title story of Liberation Day (Random House, $28) is that you woke up one night from a dream and wrote something on your notepad, thinking it was the most brilliant idea. And when you woke up, you found it said: “Custer in the Bardo.”

For low-vision viewers, bright colors, which reflect light, are easiest to see. The cover of Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant’s new book Health Communism is thus bright blue––what Adler-Bolton calls “true blue,” and what the Pantone color guide calls #2736 C. The coauthors’ names aren’t on the cover. Instead, they’re listed inside, on one of the opening pages.  Adler-Bolton and Vierkant are perhaps best known as two of the hosts of Death Panel, a health justice podcast which takes its name from Sarah Palin’s 2009 claim that federal universal health-care would lead to state-sanctioned austerity and murder (which, as

What does it do to us to lose someone? What does it do to a family? Can we separate our private devastation from the broader world that created the conditions under which we suffer loss? 

So far this year, seven people have died while in custody at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex. During ever more regular heat waves, reports spread of incarcerated people gasping for breath under door cracks and sharing one jug of water between twelve men. Violence, guard brutality, prisoner self-harm, and scant medical care are standard. Rikers, in short, is a humanitarian crisis. Five years ago, an official closure plan aiming to shutter Rikers by 2027 was introduced. While abolitionists have rightly called for No New Jails to replace the moribund institution, the plan involves its replacement with four borough-based

Kai Bosworth. Photo: Annabelle Marcovici. In his new book, Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century, scholar Kai Bosworth investigates the rise of environmental populism alongside the Indigenous-led protests of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. In showing how anti-pipeline struggles grew to include broader coalitions of protesters, Bosworth digs into the motivations of the rural white settlers involved in these struggles, discussing different notions of property, the desire for autonomy, and ties to place and community. But he warns that mass participation itself should not eclipse decolonization and defunct pipelines as political aims. Instead, Bosworth argues

ASAD RAZA: Your new book, The Last Days of Roger Federer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28), is in part a meditation on the tennis great and his retirement. It’s also about the late careers of other athletes, writers, artists, and musicians—Bob Dylan, Eve Babitz, Beethoven, to name a few. In this sense, you are writing about time, and this is reflected in the book’s unique formal structure. Can you tell me how that came about?

“Often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, explaining her frequent boredom with adventure stories. Kim Stanley Robinson is, among many things, a great spinner of adventures—but whether he’s depicting Earth’s colonization of Mars or geopolitical intrigues in Antarctica, the fast pace of events in his novels never crowds out their rich inner worlds. These inner depths are usually set against and within the drama of landscapes both seductive and deserving of respect. So it’s no surprise that The High Sierra: A Love Story, his first nonfiction book aside from

Emily St. John Mandel is known for novels that hopscotch through time and transform and transcend genre. She has tackled everything from devastating pandemics (written before our own), Madoffesque Ponzi schemes, theater troupes, addiction, and the global shipping industry. Her 2014 best-seller, Station Eleven, was adapted into a critically acclaimed miniseries that premiered on HBO in late 2021.   Mandel’s sixth novel, Sea of Tranquility, is her most ambitious to date, spanning five hundred years, from early-twentieth-century Canada to a moon colony in 2401, the eras knitted together by her first authorial foray into time travel and metaphysics. But no

Caren Beilin. Photo: Aaron Shulman Caren Beilin’s prose trusts us to invest in the logic, sound, and feeling at hand. I come for the sentences, and I stay for the politics. Her prior work in fiction and nonfiction challenges medical narratives; gives voice to the chronically ill; presents surreal, continuous menstruation alongside historical anecdote; and resists gendered positions of listening and caretaking. I have the sense as I read Beilin that we are making discoveries at the same time, reader and writer together, that the sentences propel realizations as opposed to the other way around. In Beilin’s new novel,