Standing Firm / This is not the note I expected to write, but then: these are not the times that we wished to live in. The books in this issue were selected in a period of tremendous hope, and arrive to you in a period of great... Read More

Of Art & Consequences / At Foreword, we love a good dystopian novel. See Kree and The Way in our literary fiction feature for evidence: in them, survivors fight through “fetid” worlds, finding and enacting mercy where they can and... Read More

Shaken and Stirred / Feeling cursed to live in interesting times, I spent early summer sympathizing with Cassandra, who witnessed avoidable disasters amid her piles of unheeded warnings. Were we here again? It all felt too familiar. This... Read More

Hope, Always / “Now, as forever, there is hope.” These words preface beloved novelist Bret Lott’s Gather the Olives, a memoir of his time among friends in Israel and Palestine. They were written in the after—in a time when war... Read More

The Book Bait / An ongoing dispute between my husband and I: is Mr. Coreander, the bookseller in The Neverending Story, friend or foe? In recent years I’ve filed him as a villain. He baits Bastian with the book, I’ve argued, and he... Read More

Here we are now, Entertain Us / As we wrapped our issue, the months-long Writer’s Guild of America strike came to a tentative conclusion—a purported victory for the strikers. But Hollywood executives did not honor the writers’... Read More

The Shame of It / In the record-breaking heat of the compressed summer, I learned a new and horrifying term: “wet bulb temperature.” It came alongside a forecast map on which whole Southern states were blacked out. On those days: it... Read More

Thanks to You / It began with awareness that the world was changing—and, with it, publishing. That independent books were not a fad; that they were, in fact, doing work that was quite extraordinary. That they were worthy of... Read More