Who can resist a diary? They promise intimate revelations—the confidences that let us glimpse the human condition, which we turn to literature for but don’t always find—alongside the rhythms and texture of life as we live it, day by day. And each diary is unique; each represents a specific set of circumstances met by a specific mind. It’s fun to dip into John Cheever’s and then Franz Kafka’s, like moving between an icy pool and a hot tub—a pleasant shock.

Towards the end of the 1996 documentary, Listening for Something…, Dionne Brand gently corrects Adrienne Rich, specifying that Brand does not write “for” Black people, but “to them.” The differences between these two approaches are both subtle and profound. “For” implies a gifting, something that can be accepted—or put on a shelf and ignored. “To” implies a momentary communion, and asks for engagement and togetherness. While the entire conversation between these two brilliant poets gives the audience plenty to think through some twenty years later, it is Brand’s remark that I’ve carried with me and thought most intensely about in

There is an admonition James Baldwin made somewhere that sticks with me. It moved me enough to make a note on a scrap of paper—too hastily to cite title, text, page number. “Baldwin does not say that systems of power are unimportant,” I scratched out. “He insists that liberation is also a mandate on individuality: how one separates oneself from the ‘habits of thought [that] reinforce and sustain the habits of power.’”

Several years ago at a friend’s wedding reception, the mother of the groom said to me, “I hope someday you get to experience the joy of a child.” She paused for a moment, then followed up: “Or perhaps you don’t need to, since you’re a writer.” Though many might object to the idea that a book and a child are interchangeable, there’s a long history of comparing—and conflating—these two creations. (After all, what was Ulysses if not Joyce’s attempt to rival parturition in linguistic form?) Writers, both those who are mothers and those who aren’t, have long sought to demonstrate

Of the fifteen women who have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, six are from Eastern or Central Europe. Born between 1891 and 1962, in the stretch of land from East Germany to Belarus, these Nobel women differ wildly in the way they write—especially about power and hopelessness, two subjects they all share. There’s Elfriede Jelinek, whose 1983 novel The Piano Teacher uses BDSM as a way of talking about abuse and deviance. Then there’s Svetlana Alexievich, whose renderings of Chernobyl testimony are as spare and haunting as the exclusion zone itself. And, of course, there’s Olga Tokarczuk, whose dialogue

In books on the borderlands, the white gaze abounds: Latinx authors are told there’s just no budget for our stories, while seven-figure advances are granted to establishment writers who consider the border from a distance. Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, a book about a woman and her son fleeing Mexico for the United States, was quickly anointed by Oprah Winfrey as a must-read. The fact that it was written by a white, nonmigrant novelist at first failed to register. (Soon after, nearly one hundred authors asked Winfrey to reconsider.) The controversy was the latest illustration of how literature suffers when writers

With Amélie Nothomb’s latest, Strike Your Heart, the Francophone author of twenty-five books seems to have finally found some of the American attention she deserves. (I’m basing this assessment in part on the displays of almost every New York City bookstore’s front table.) Europeans have long been wild about Nothomb: The king of Belgium named her a baroness, she’s won several of the continent’s most respected literary prizes, and articles from overseas claim that fellow Parisians treat her like a celebrity whenever she ventures out in public. She is prolific, with a precise and distinctive voice that never fails to

During the last presidential election cycle, you may have read reports describing the alt-right—a loosely organized group of anti-PC, anti-feminist, race-obsessed online warriors—as a strange, newly created beast. But in many ways, the movement is simply a continuation of dark trends that have long been present in American society.

It is easy to view the vast and varied landscape of marriage in the present day as a radical departure from a more conservative past. But many of these marriage alternatives—including polyamory, open relationships, and the rejection of marriage altogether—have existed for as long as marriage has. In some cases, we appear downright quaint when compared to our predecessors. Models for non-traditional coupling have long been found in fiction and nonfiction alike. Ultimately, the question of who to marry and how—or if at all—is a question of how to live. We’ve been tinkering with the answer for ages, with no

During the last election cycle, the American working class got a lot of airplay. Donald Trump’s rhetoric was a throwback to a different era of politics and a different economy. Talk of American workers often included overt and coded criticism of China, which was portrayed as a villainous and devious nation that had stolen jobs from deserving Americans. Of course, the Asian workers (many of whom are not Chinese) who were supposedly responsible for America’s declining fortunes were never mentioned.

In the Chinese literary world, speculative fiction has long been a necessary means of critique and protest against an overbearing regime. Science fiction authors create new (often dystopian) universes as one of the few ways to criticize the government and contend with the legacy of the cultural revolution. In China, the state presides over most of the publishing houses, so when writers want to explore forbidden ideas about progress, humanity, and the balance between individuality and the greater good, it’s often safer to package them in the guise of speculative fiction. Still, the authors’ critiques of contemporary Chinese society are