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Joe Raedle / Getty / Katie Martin / ... The Uncommon, Requisite Resolve of Michelle Obama
The former first lady’s new memoir is notable for the revealing glimpses it offers into private moments of fear and frustration.
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Viktoriia1208 / Shutterstock / Arsh Raziuddin / The ... A Road-Trip Novel That Punctures Political Myopia
Carol Bensimon’s We All Loved Cowboys features a difficult protagonist whose myopia belies the wide, complex world outside her car window.
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Dawit L. Petros / Courtesy of Cassava Republic ... A Brilliant Travelogue That Presents Africa Through a New Lens
A recent book by Emmanuel Iduma expands what writing about the continent can be by paying extraordinary attention to the ebbs and flows of human connection.
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Graywolf Everything Under Is a Dark and Mesmerizing Story About Fate
The 27-year-old author, Daisy Johnson, pulls off several marvels at once in her debut novel, which made the Man Booker Prize shortlist.
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Arsh Raziuddin The Confounding Truth About Frederick Douglass
His champions now span the ideological spectrum, but left and right miss the tensions in his views.
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Fantagraphics Capturing Europe’s Refugee Crisis Through Comics
In her graphic memoir, Drawn to Berlin, Ali Fitzgerald uses art to illuminate the human dimensions of a situation often sketched in statistics.
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Rune Fisker Jack Reacher Still Won’t Quit, 23 Books Later
The literary hero’s coffee-chugging, cigarette-devouring creator, Lee Child, just released his latest novel. He shows no signs of slowing down.
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Illustration: Celina Pereira; Nationaal Archief / Wikimedia Lucia Berlin’s Harrowing, Radiant Fiction
Having lived a hard life, the late author refused to erase her female characters—or the brutality that deranges them.
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David Polonsky / Pantheon / The Atlantic The Quandary of Illustrating Anne Frank
A graphic adaptation of the teenage Holocaust victim’s diary calls into question which avenues are best for retelling painful, complicated histories.
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Andrey_Kuzmin / Shutterstock / Arsh Raziuddin / The ... What Happens After You Become the ‘Most Famous Undocumented Immigrant in America’
In his memoir, the journalist Jose Antonio Vargas attempts to tell the story of his own life while recognizing that he’s often viewed as a voice for millions.
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AP / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic The Decades-Old Novel That Presages Today’s Fight for Facts
Uwe Johnson’s magnum opus Anniversaries, which catalogs the life of its protagonist for the span of a year, is a sharp exploration of the daily effort to preserve shared truths.
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Alvaro Dominguez Barbara Kingsolver’s Superficial View of the American Family in the Trump Era
The first U.S. novel to treat the 2016 election at length aims for timeliness rather than genuine insight into a dramatic political moment.
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Christine Wehrmeier / Getty / Arsh Raziuddin / ... The Unstable Identities of The Caregiver
Samuel Park’s last novel explores how one person’s sense of self can be absorbed into another’s need.
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Beth Hoeckel Women Are Furious. Now What?
In her new book, Rebecca Traister invokes rage to unify women in a battle against men. But being mad can prove divisive, too.
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Amy Walker / Wikimedia Commons The Power of Untold Slave Narratives
In Barracoon, Zora Neale Hurston challenges the American public’s narrow view of the African continent, the transatlantic slave trade, and the diasporic cultures that came as a result of it.
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Little, Brown Spark The ‘Untrue’ Woman
A new book makes the case for the primacy of the female libido, and for a societal reckoning with that reality.
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Found Image Holdings / Getty Boom Town Explodes the Notion of ‘Flyover’ Territory
Sam Anderson’s ambitious new book about Oklahoma City reanimates a place that has too often been portrayed as simplistic.
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Naples National Archeological Museum / Wikimedia Commons The Silence of Classical Literature’s Women
Pat Barker’s retelling of The Iliad imagines the Trojan War from the perspective of a female slave fought over by two Greek heroes.
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Tillie Walden / First Second Books An Intergalactic Tale Populated by Women
With the graphic novel On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden has created a science-fiction universe of queer love, crumbling ruins, and magical forests. It might piss off the genre’s purists.
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Mara Vivat / Getty How To Write About Royalty
In 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, the author Craig Brown captures Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister perfectly.
