All is quiet at Our Lady of the Nile, an elite boarding school high in the mountains of Rwanda. Or so it seems. Our Lady of the Nile, Scholastique Mukasonga’s fairytale-like novel, is the literary equivalent of a slow burn. Set in 1979, it is a highly charged, fictional account of the events leading up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Using an unlikely focal point—a gaggle of senior-class high school girls at a small, religious school—Mukasonga answers the question of how such an atrocity could have occurred. The author lost twenty-seven members of her family in the genocide, so she is familiar

All artists steal, but some art makes a subject of the theft. In the early 1980s, Sherrie Levine tore twenty pages from a book of watercolors by J. M. W. Turner, signed them, framed them, and showed them in a London gallery. Levine’s earlier series, “After Walker Evans,” which resides in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, consists of copies of prints made from Evans’s negatives. It comes down to medium and quantity; you start with materials that are worthless and easily obtainable, and you end with something solid, scarce, signed. Put another way, you could not print

The essay, at its best, is a genre shaped by the character of its author. Charles D’Ambrosio describes it as “a forum for self-doubt.” The author’s irresolution runs throughout his new essay collection, Loitering (Tin House Books, 2014). In one piece, he describes watching a crow peck the breast of an injured robin, shortly after his brother’s suicide. Should he intervene? Would it matter? In another, he questions the motives of whale rights activists. Do they want to save whales because they no longer believe people can be saved? D’Ambrosio says that as a child he believed whales rose to the

In 1999, I spent my eighth-grade spring break with my mother, visiting my aunt in Rockville, Maryland. In a never-repeated experiment, my father and younger sister went on a separate vacation to Disney World. While they rode the Tower of Terror, we spent our days on the clean, empty Metro as my mom, who had lived on O Street during her first marriage in the 1970s, showed me around the city. One afternoon we went to the Tower Records in Foggy Bottom, where I found Jesus Saves by Darcey Steinke. Its yellow cover bore a black line drawing of a bikinied woman—a girl, really—in a Christlike pose,

For all its advantages, the novel must cede ground to the short story when it comes to capturing the contemporary idiom. A great story collection, and Justin Taylor’s Flings is a great story collection, swoops through the world like a butterfly net capturing not only the way we speak but the way we think.

Take the following moment from the unforgettable story “Sungold,” in which our narrator describes his job at a bar-restaurant, which requires him to wear a giant mushroom costume on the street corner, attempting to bring in customers. He is hopping inside the foam suit on a summer day in

First published in 1980, Edmund White’s States of Desire, (recently republished in an expanded edition), is a late-’70s travelogue in which the author candidly describes gay men and gay life in places throughout the US. The book was written at a time when the gay-liberation movement was gaining momentum—helped in no small part by White’s frank and revealing work—and the AIDS crisis was still a few years away. Consequently, States of Desire offers a portrait of gay life in an era of transformation and questioning, of new possibilities and a sense of hope. But old attitudes of homophobia,