The Book That Made Physics Personal When Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time in 1988, the received wisdom was that every equation in a popular science book would cut sales in half. Hawking ignored this warning and included one – E = mc2 – and watched the book spend 237 weeks on the…
The Body Remade Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch is a collection about the trans body – about what it means to inhabit a body that is in the process of becoming what it should be, to live through the long difficult work of transition while also living through addiction recovery, grief, and the…
A Memoir That Refuses Its Own Form Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House defies easy categorization, which is perhaps why it appears here alongside poetry collections – it has the compression and the formal self-consciousness of the best poetry, even though it is, strictly speaking, a memoir. Published by Graywolf Press in 2019, it…
A Poet Most People Forgot to Notice Ursula K. Le Guin was known to the world primarily as a novelist – the author of the Hainish Cycle, the Earthsea novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed. What was less widely known outside the literary poetry community was that she had been writing and publishing…
Poetry as Survival Rachel McKibbens’s blud is a book about what it costs to survive: the particular costs of surviving a violent childhood, mental illness, addiction, and the specific violences visited on women and on bodies marked as other. It is not a comfortable book. It does not offer the reader reassurance or the flattering…
The Title as Argument The title of Chen Chen’s second collection arrives as a kind of joke that is also an emergency: Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. It captures the book’s characteristic register perfectly – absurdist on the surface, devastating underneath, and using the forms and phrases of bureaucratic modernity to do lyric…
The Body as Witness Ada Limon’s The Carrying arrived in 2018 and immediately established itself as one of the essential American poetry collections of the decade. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, but more importantly, it accumulated a genuine readership of people…
The Poem That Changed Everything Published in 1922 in The Criterion and then in The Dial, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land arrived like a detonation. It was immediately recognized as something unprecedented, and its reputation as the defining text of Anglo-American literary modernism has only grown in the century since. This Harcourt edition collects The…
A Country Under Occupation, A People Gone Deaf Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic arrived in 2019 and immediately announced itself as something rare: a book of poems that reads with the urgency of a novel and the moral weight of a parable. Set in an unnamed occupied town called Vasenka, the collection follows the townspeople who,…
The Phenomenon and the Book Twilight is one of the best-selling novels of the twenty-first century, a cultural phenomenon that arrived in 2005 and spent years reshaping the YA publishing landscape. It is also a novel that has attracted enormous critical disdain – for its prose, its gender politics, its conception of romantic love. Both…