Twenty-one-year-old Farhad finds his life upended when he breaks a seemingly minor law in 1979 Kabul. The indiscretion that launches Farhad’s nightmare is terrifying for its... Read More

In 1580, the French essayist and minor nobleman Michel de Montaigne had an audience with Henri III, King of France. The king broke the ice: he had read Montaigne’s Essays, he... Read More

The history of World War II is so rich in character and detail that fiction presented alongside often pales in comparison, and this is especially true for a story so nuanced and... Read More

“Her heart beat through her skin and the skin jumped, the hard bone of a child’s elbow or knee in its womb.” Michelle Hoover documents the difficult lives of two farmwomen... Read More

A select few literary greats had the privilege of loving so deeply, so intensely, that their lives were never again mundane. Inspired by her lover Henri de Latouche, a prominent... Read More

Isaac’s Torah (Other Press, 978-1-59051-245-6) is a very funny book about very sad events. Isaac Blumenfeld suffers at the hands of the Nazis, loses his entire family when his... Read More

Mind Menders. Why does it matter that Freud went to Putnam’s camp in 1909 during his only visit to the U.S.? “History offers any number of poignant, unlikely conjunctions of... Read More

In the story “Words and Rags,” writes one editor, “Our dialect has the sounds of intimacy, the sounds of an enclosed hermetically sealed world.” In this collection of... Read More

“ ’There is no “world,” said Charlotte, wiping her face with her wrist. ‘There’s just a bunch of separate people.’” Coming from a woman who has recently married,... Read More

One warm autumn afternoon, the author finds her world turned upside down when she awakes from a nap as usual, but her husband does not. Instead of waking normally, Jack’s... Read More

Fifteen abortions in as many years would indeed make motherhood seem to be an impossible dream, yet Irene Vilar is now married and, in spite of medical predictions to the... Read More

How rare are unflinching acts of self-reflexivity. “Eric had once commented on how closely I listened to him. Enough to steal a piece of his soul,” ends one of the essays in... Read More