Mona Chollet. Photo: © Mathieu Zazzo. It is a misconception that witch hunts only occurred during the Middle Ages—many took place during the alleged lucidity of the Renaissance. Men exploited the climate of suspicion to dispose of women they didn’t want around. Whole family lines were wiped out. Nonconforming women were denounced, humiliated, and killed. Centuries later, this kind of persecution continues in insidious ways, underpinned by relentless misogyny and victim blaming. The same female figures are still considered dangerous: the single woman, the childless woman, the aging woman—all dismissed with fear, pity, or horror. This is the premise

Stuart Jeffries is an author and journalist who has contributed to The Guardian for decades as an editor and critic. His illuminating biography of the Frankfurt School, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, was published in 2016 by Verso. It was a considerable, pleasantly accessible account of brilliant and conflicted thinkers, cultural Marxism, and the fight against fascism. The subjects of his latest book, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern, include David Bowie, Grand Theft Auto, Margaret Thatcher, Jeff Koons, Chris Kraus’s novel I Love Dick, and Judith Butler, among others. I recently

John Koenig’s new book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, lives up to its description as a “compendium of new words for emotions.” To many readers, the most recognizable of his neologisms is surely sonder—“the realization that each random passerby is the main character of their own story, in which you are just an extra in the background”—which Koenig introduced years ago and has since found its way into the popular lexicon because of, one assumes, the ubiquity of the realization. Yet any dictionary is also an exhibition of language’s status as a—or, depending on which theorist you consult, the—fundamental

Geo Maher. Photo: Verso Seventeen months after George Floyd was executed by cops in Minneapolis, sparking the most potent Black liberation uprisings in this country in decades, the city held a vote on the future of its police. Minneapolitans were asked to vote on an amendment that would replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety focused on public health solutions. The amendment lost; 56 percent of voters rejected it. All too triumphant headlines followed: this was, we were to understand, a full rebuke of that silly idea that people would want to get rid

Brian Evenson. Photo: Kristen Tracey, © 2021. Brian Evenson’s latest collection, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, was published by Coffee House Press in August. Its stories often depict mysterious worlds in which several realities splinter apart. No one is who they seem to be. Everything is a lie, and nothing is true. Today, as our wealthiest citizens race to leave the planet and climate change takes its toll on our forests, oceans, and air, Evenson’s unblinking stories of genetic mutations and ecological disaster read as both cautionary and strangely transcendent. DAVID PEAK: Several stories in The Glassy, Burning

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Photo: Kayla Holdread The writer Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi has just published a new novel, Savage Tongues. The book, her third, features a middle-aged writer, Arezu, who returns to a family property in Spain for the first time in twenty years. As a teenager, Arezu had a brutal affair in the apartment with an older man, Omar. Revisiting the site means coming to terms with abuse, violence, desire, and the ways in which politics and power infuse our intimate lives. For Bookforum, poet and writer Nazlı Koca spoke to Oloomi about personal and

Katie Engelhart. Photo: Owain Rich Mainstream debates over assisted suicide, or the “right to die,” are predictable. The so-called “sanctity of life” is pitched against “personal autonomy,” while murkier questions of context, political power, and personhood remain uninterrogated. Journalist Katie Engelhart’s The Inevitable does more than perhaps any book to date to advance and complicate the issue. The intensively reported text offers intimate portraits of people seeking and fighting to expand the “right to die,” each of whom seems to edge closer and closer to what we might call “imit cases”: individuals whose desires for physician-assisted deaths are fraught