Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz–just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy–collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something—a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. “You’re here, but you’re not here,” her daughter said to her one night. “Where are you, Mom?”

Joannie hadn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer-camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash-lands his hot-air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.

Drawing from her twenty years of teaching experience and her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. Each element is explored through short, inspiring, and craft-focused essays, followed by generative writing prompts. Dear Writer provides tools that artists of all experience levels can apply to their own creative practices and carry with them into all genres and all areas of life.

Unwanted and neglected from birth, Barbara Graham had to overcome the odds just to survive. Her beauty was both a blessing and a curse—offering her too many options of all the wrong kind. Her innate sensitivity left her vulnerable to the harsh realities of the street, where she was left to fend for herself before she reached double digits. Her record of petty crimes spoke to a life that constantly teetered on the brink of disaster. But in 1953, a catastrophic twist of fate would catapult her out of obscurity and into the headlines.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.

In this close-up look at the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven and married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth when she wrote about their passion back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love.

On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness. Digging into the events that led to her mother’s break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Sloane Caraway is a liar. Harmless lies, mostly, to make her self-proclaimed sad, little life a bit more interesting. So when Sloane sees a young girl in tears at a park one afternoon, she can't help herself—she tells the girl’s (very attractive) dad she’s a nurse and helps him pull a bee stinger from the girl’s foot. With this lie, and chance encounter, Sloane becomes the nanny for the wealthy, and privileged Jay and Violet Lockhart. The perfect New York couple, with a brownstone, a daughter in private school, and summers on Block Island.

In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.

Joannie hadn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer-camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash-lands his hot-air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.

It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein—mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite—is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation. But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?

What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters.

“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace―the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are.

In October 2008, someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” called Bitcoin to an arcane listserv populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto, and just as people were starting to wonder who he was, he vanished. As the years passed, and the scope of Nakamoto’s achievement became clear, the truth of his identity grew into the greatest unsolved mystery of our time. The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto traces Benjamin Wallace’s attempt to unmask the figure behind the currency and the world it wrought.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.

In this powerful, edgy, and funny debut novel about making right and wrong choices, Bump gives us an unforgettable and lovable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude is a young black man in search of a place where he can fit; born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change. After a riot consumes his neighborhood, Claude decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new life and identity. But he discovers, there's no escaping the people and places that made him.

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia.

The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there–and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression. In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back.

Morocco, 1928. Marie-Madeleine Méric is not the kind of woman who stays quietly at her husband’s side. Polyglot, pianist, and pilot, she is a woman of many skills, with unconventional interests—like driving in car rallies—that earn her a daredevil reputation. But dabbling in intelligence work to assist her military officer husband and the French government helps her recognize who she is at heart: an adventurer.

Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist processing the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed himself in a cult called “the nameless.” Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran named Odo, the nameless adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as “all suffering is distortion” and “see only beauty.”

A carefree New England vacation is just what sixteen-year-old Lucia needs to chase her sadness away. At least, according to her mom, who whisks them away for the summer with her ridiculously wealthy new boyfriend. Nothing bad happens in Nantucket, a charming island with cobblestone streets and million-dollar cottages. But when Lucia stumbles upon the body of a teenage girl on a beach, the discovery reopens old wounds from her past. With the dead girl's identity a mystery, Lucia takes it upon herself to investigate and crosses paths with Selah and her pack of devil-may-care besties.

At age fourteen, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant. At school, Delano was elected the class president and earned straight-As and a national squash ranking; at home, she unleashed all the rage and despair she felt, lashing out at her family and locking herself in her bedroom, obsessing over death.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC-Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans. The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing?