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…
The World That Changed Everything There is a before and after Harry Potter in the history of children’s literature and popular fiction, and twenty-five years of distance have only clarified how extraordinary the achievement of the first novel really is. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone does not merely introduce a magical world – it…
The Novel That Launched a Major Voice John Green’s debut novel won the Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature when it was published in 2005, and it has never gone out of print. Looking for Alaska is a boarding school novel, a friendship story, and a meditation on mortality, all compressed into 221…
Thomas arrives in the Glade with no memory of who he is or why he was sent there. The Glade is a self-sustaining enclosure whose outer walls open each day onto a shifting stone Maze — a structure that has been running since before any of the current residents arrived, and which no one has…
Summary Jonas lives in the Community, a small, orderly settlement in what appears to be a distant future. Generations ago, the founders made a calculated trade: they surrendered pain and conflict, along with color, music, strong emotion, and personal choice, in exchange for safety and equality. The result is a place without war, without hunger,…
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