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On the same day each August, Ana Magdalena Bach travels by ferry to a Caribbean island, in order to lay a gladiolus bouquet on her mother’s grave. Afterwards, she spends the night in the same hotel overlooking a lagoon inhabited by blue herons. Against an evocative backdrop of jungles and beaches, this pilgrimage remains unvarying for eight years, until the opening of Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August, when Ana Magdalena makes the startling decision to have a one-night stand with a stranger. Upon each subsequent trip to the island, she seeks out a different man, embarking on a series of strange, often fraught affairs.  

García Márquez worked on Until August in his final years as dementia increasingly eroded his ability to write. Its publication comes a decade after his death, and García Márquez’s sons admit in the book’s preface that the Nobel laureate himself said, “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” But upon returning to the drafts years later, his sons believed the book to be better than García Márquez had judged, and decided that it was worthy of publication. 

Indeed, this novella, and its crisp translation by Anne McLean, avoids the disappointment of many other infamous posthumous releases from canonical authors. Part of its success can be credited to editor Cristóbal Pera’s care in piecing together García Márquez’s drafts and annotations. Although lacking the intoxicating complexity of García Márquez’s most famous works, Until August echoes the elegant mastery of time and change that propelled novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera into greatness. 

Each year brings lush depictions of change on the island—with its impoverished villages and shining tourist resorts—and in Ana Magdalena. Few novelists, even in their prime, are capable of matching the steady control and organic surprise García Márquez mixes into the evolution of Ana Magdalena’s marriage and family life back on the mainland. There is a quality of immediacy in every action in Until August, and readers will feel the thudding swings of emotion as a shout causes a silence that “remained vitrified for several days in the air of the house,” or Ana Magdalena watches a lover who sleeps looking “like an enormous orphan.” 

This brief offering delivers graceful insight into the fickle human heart, serving as an absorbing—if quiet—epilogue to García Márquez’s towering oeuvre.

This posthumous novella delivers graceful insight into the fickle human heart, serving as an absorbing—if quiet—epilogue to García Márquez’s towering oeuvre.
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RuPaul, drag superstar and pop culture icon, has been busy on his lifelong way to stardom—a destiny, he reveals, foretold by a psychic before he was born. He has been an actor, producer, author, model, dancer, singer, songwriter, media host, business mogul and creator of the multi-Emmy-winning reality TV series, “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” He has worked his way from unhoused nomad to celebrity star, including an actual one on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Now 63, RuPaul turns his penetrating gaze inward, looking for deeper meanings within his journey. In The House of Hidden Meanings, he shares all with a tender clarity that renders him unforgettably human. 

Ernestine Charles chose her only son’s name because, she said, there was no one else “alive with a name like that.” Raising four children in San Diego after her abusive husband left, she was “always in a bad mood.” RuPaul entertained her with “imitations, bits, sketches, little scraps of makeshift theater. . . . I put her powder on and whipped a towel around my head as if it were a lustrous head of hair,” he recalls. As a teenager, he escaped to Atlanta and eventually worked his way to New York City. Club scenes kept him performing and partying. He always acted like a star, he says, because he knew he was one.

RuPaul paints wildly vivid city scenes: gritty New York, Atlanta alive with punk and drag, and San Diego, where his complicated childhood haunts him still. Relationships were often sidetracked by too many drugs and risky sex, but he somehow survived, always believing in his destiny—and in drag. His 1993 breakthrough video, “Supermodel (You Better Work),” turned gay stereotypes on their heads and showcased an exuberance that appealed to both the mainstream and the LGBTQ+ community.

Here, we don’t find his rise to fame, the lead-up to “Drag Race” or even his activism and philanthropic work. That information about the often-profiled star is readily available elsewhere.  The House of Hidden Meanings is about beginnings. RuPaul reveals the inner work of healing from past wounds and repairing his relationship with himself, and his memoir celebrates the potential for reinvention. “In a system where things insisted on being one or the other, drag was everything,” he writes. “That made it magic.”

In his refreshing memoir, drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul tells his life story with a tender clarity that renders a larger-than-life figure unforgettably human.

Jennifer Thorne’s Diavola is an exercise in delicious twists and masterful suspense, told in the smart, snarky voice of Anna Pace, a jaded Manhattanite on a vacation quite literally from hell.

Anna’s swanky upcoming family trip certainly doesn’t seem monstrous on the outside. A marketing artist by trade and a painter by passion, she’s thrilled at the prospect of renting a Tuscan villa in the picturesque Italian countryside. The problem is her family. Thorne immediately places readers in Anna’s anxious thoughts, and her dread at having to see her parents and siblings, let alone take an entire trip with them, seeps into your bones before any of the other characters even arrive on the page. From a never-ending cycle of guilt trips to spiteful gaslighting, the tension between the Pace siblings and their alternatively aloof and agitated parents is so palpable that you wonder why they torture themselves every year. It’s soon clear that their stay at Villa Taccola might be the last straw.

As ugly stories and past grudges are revealed and Italian wine flows freely, the vengeful spirits of the villa decide it’s time to feast, and events quickly spiral out of control. Thorne pays homage to a cornucopia of mythology, sprinkling in some art and architecture history for good measure, as the Paces struggle to make it through each night. Diavola is a ferocious, maximalist horror ride, an impressive display of Thorne’s skill at crafting unsettling and disorienting scenes. There’s a rottenness lurking within the Pace family—Anna included—but it’s hard not to sympathize with them as they battle night terrors, horrifying visions and spirit possession. After all, whose family is perfect?

Diavola is a ferocious, maximalist horror ride, an impressive display of Jennifer Thorne’s skill at crafting unsettling and disorienting scenes of terror.
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Early in the shattering true crime memoir Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story, Kristine S. Ervin pauses mid-sentence to tackle a question of grammar. Which tense does one use when discussing a relationship in which one person has died? It is a question that seems to form the crux of this stunning debut: that such a relationship does continue, though on very altered lines.

When Ervin was 8, her mother was abducted from a parking lot, her body later found in an Oklahoma oil field. Both the mechanics of the police investigation and emotional reverberations continued for the next 25 years, the brutal act lapsing into cold case territory. Lost in the background was Ervin, a confused child growing into a motherless teenager, the years bringing with them both new, terrible information about her mother’s killing and an evolving relationship with the mother Ervin might have had. Ervin achingly portrays not just the unmoored girlhood she experienced, but the lifelong processing of trauma that comes from personal and early knowledge of the violence against women lurking around every corner.

In the opening pages, Ervin dedicates the book to her 8-year-old self, and indeed, parts read as her efforts to reach backwards and mother her younger self in the absence of her murdered parent. While the facts of the crime and the unfolding of the investigation are clearly and baldly delineated, this is an emotional journey intimately revealed. Ervin is a poet, and her language here is lyrical. Her depictions of unimaginable cruelty cut so close to the bone that they feel almost tangibly interior. Rhapsodic and startling, Rabbit Heart moves inside of you and explores the places of rage and grief that are often left unmonitored, revealing both the power and danger of womanhood in a violent world.

Kristine S. Ervin’s Rabbit Heart is a shattering, rhapsodic true crime memoir that will get inside you.

MacArthur fellow and National Book Award finalist Hanif Abdurraqib is a prolific poet and author, writing across genres of poetry, essay and cultural criticism to great acclaim. Abdurraqib turns his sensitive lens towards basketball in his newest work, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. With carefully constructed and imaginative prose, he immerses us in the basketball culture of his native East Columbus, Ohio, telling stories of hoop dreams, both deferred and fully realized.

Abdurriqib pays tribute to myriad figures, both ballers and civilians, who were part of the richly portrayed social web of East Columbus and the larger Black Ohio that it is situated in. We learn about East Columbus players who dominated courts in high school and college, leaving indelible marks on their community even though they didn’t thrive on the biggest stages. We also get to intimately witness the ascension and cultural impact of LeBron James, a hooper from nearby Akron who became one of basketball’s most recognizable, successful and yet polarizing figures.

Abdurraqib’s examination of basketball culture is, in and of itself, captivating. However, the book transcends the particulars of the sport to become a powerful meditation on place and community. The author paints a complex but loving portrait of East Columbus as its members navigate moments of love, grief, hope, fellowship and conflict. He generously and seamlessly weaves in his own story, offering it up as a conduit for the reader’s self-reflection.

Abdurraqib’s writing on basketball is among the best of our time, and it centers the sport’s relevance in local communities, a grossly underexplored element. At the same time, There’s Always This Year offers beautiful reflections on personal and communal journeys that have the power to transform anyone willing to step on the court.

Read our interview with Hanif Abdurraqib, author of ‘There’s Always This Year.’

Hanif Abdurraqib’s captivating There’s Always This Year is a powerful meditation on place and community.
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In his haunting debut, Death Row Welcomes You: Visiting Hours in the Shadow of the Execution Chamber, Tennessee journalist Steven Hale sheds light on a rarely seen part of American society: the places where more than 2,700 people await execution by the state.

Hale’s reporting began when, after a decade-long lull, Tennessee began executing the condemned at speed. He witnessed the first of seven executions that would take place over two years. Tennessee and other states have struggled to acquire the preferred lethal injection drug, pentobarbital, and a new three-drug protocol to be used instead was challenged in Tennessee court for amounting to cruel and unusual punishment—to no avail. 

A former staff writer for the alt-weekly Nashville Scene, Hale reports from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution through the lens of a group of regular visitors who provide condemned men with friendship and compassion in the years (sometimes decades) leading up to their death, including a Nashville reverend who has acted as an advocate and spiritual advisor for death row inmates since the 1970s. Hale writes vividly about the fear and boredom that marks daily life in a maximum-security prison, and how the visitors offer relief and fellowship. They bring friends and neighbors to their weekly meetings, including those who support capital punishment, thinking that the “best way to expose the inhumanity of the death penalty was to expose people to the humanity of the men condemned to it.” 

Death Row Welcomes You is an engrossing if sometimes harrowing read. Hale starkly recounts the crimes that led to death sentences, including gruesome murders, brutal sexual assaults and drug deals gone horribly wrong. Yet the book does not fixate on grisly details the way so many salacious podcasts and TV shows do. Hale delves into the childhoods of the men he profiles, many of whom experienced abject poverty, neglect and abuse, and presents these facts as important context in which to view the full scope of their crimes and subsequent state-sanctioned killing. These stories are balanced by moving accounts of the supportive relationships among the condemned men, like when a man chose to forgo his prison-provided last meal in favor of communing with his fellows over homemade pizzas, the ingredients plucked from their personal stashes. 

“The people, experiences and research that make up this book have changed my life,” Hale writes. “I hope that by preserving them here I can contribute in some small way to the idea that we are, all of us, capable of terrible and beautiful things.” Readers will reflect on this captivating, deeply reported story for years to come.  

Death Row Welcomes You is an enthralling, deeply reported story that captures the humanity of the condemned men on Tennessee’s death row.
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Kao Kalia Yang’s mother grew up in a Hmong village near the juncture of two rivers that run through the forests and highlands of Laos, a land that Yang writes evocatively about in the opening chapters of Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life. The Hmong, an ethnic minority in southwest China, Laos and surrounding countries, were devastated by the Vietnam War, which began soon after Yang’s mother Tswb (pronounced “chew’) was born. Her home village, Dej Tshuam, was a place where people were bound by family ties and ancestral traditions; her family fled the invasion of North Vietnamese soldiers when she was 14.

The ruinous impacts of the war on the lives of Yang’s parents and relatives are related here. But the point and power of Where Rivers Part lies elsewhere. In an audacious act of love and art, Yang writes this memoir from her mother’s point of view. We hear from Tswb’s perspective about her own mother’s marriage at 15 to a much older man with children, and how her mother transformed herself from a submissive wife and daughter-in-law into a matriarch. Later we experience teenage Tswb’s decision to marry a handsome 19-year-old boy named Npis (pronounced “be”) she met on the trail while their families were fleeing capture. Soon there are doubts and reassessments. We witness the emergence of the fierce determination to survive that will see her family through harrowing years of deprivation in a Thai refugee camp, and that will impel Tswb, Npis and their children forward as refugees making their way in the alien world of Minnesota.

There are moments of poignant beauty. There are also humiliations. Tswb is small and brown; her English is not good. In America, she is easily overlooked. In this exceptional book, Yang shows what a mistake it is to underestimate her: “I wanted to claim the legacy of the woman I come from, the women who had to define for themselves what it meant to live in a world where luck was not on your side.” She has done so with deep feeling and grace.

In the extraordinary Where Rivers Part, Kao Kalia Yang writes with deep feeling and grace about her mother, a Hmong woman who escaped the cascading violence from the Vietnam War.

When Sarah McCammon was growing up in the Midwest in the ’80s and ’90s, every aspect of her life was governed by her family’s evangelical faith, a faith underscored at her sprawling nondenominational church and her Christian school with expectations of an obedient childhood and “pure” young adulthood that forbid sex and, essentially, dating until marriage. Within this sheltered realm, the possibility of eternal damnation was ever-present. “The thought that there was something I could do that was beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness terrified me, and often kept me awake at night,” McCammon writes. “Intrusive thoughts would slip in randomly, at any moment . . . and suddenly I’d be gripped by fear.”

In The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, McCammon details her journey away from this upbringing, into a life as a questioning adult and then a journalist covering the 2016 Trump campaign and the reproductive rights beat for NPR. Mixing memoir and reportage, McCammon focuses on the growing number of young people who, like her, have left the evangelical fold to navigate a new world, often with ambivalence, a group loosely known as exvangelicals.

McCammon describes the mix of comfort, fear and trauma she experienced growing up: her confusion about her parents’ rejection of her surgeon grandfather, who came out as gay after his wife died; her first encounter with secular teens during a stint as a Senate page; the shock of the physical punishment her parents administered after she had a panic attack in high school. She weaves her story around those of her interviewees and the larger history of the evangelical movement’s quest for political ascendance; for instance, Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-women’s rights newsletter informed her mother’s activism, and McCammon worked as a high school intern for Schlafly. Though her own exodus came years earlier, McCammon notes that fervent support of Trump is the factor spurring the majority of young people to exit the evangelical faith.

McCammon renders exvangelicals’ search for life after evangelicalism with sensitivity, showing the difficult balance of gaining self-acceptance and a broader understanding of the world while often losing the comfort of families and worship, especially for LGBTQ+ people. The Exvangelicals is a welcome addition to the story of faith in 21th-century America.

Mixing memoir and reportage, Sarah McCammon documents the growing number of young people who, like her, have left the evangelical fold to navigate a new world.

Home is where the heart is—but what makes that heart want to live in that home forever? As someone who’s moved 10 times in his adult life and is “fascinated by the kind of people whose grandchildren visit the home that they raised their children in,” interior designer Jeremiah Brent found himself wondering what makes people stay put. As he explains in his heartfelt introduction to The Space That Keeps You: When Home Becomes a Love Story, Brent “wanted to understand what it takes to fall in love with a space, because my fantasy was to truly come home.” The fruits of his exploration are contained in this sumptuous “emotional design” book filled with photos of, yes, beautifully decorated homes, but also carefully curated mementos, as Brent relays stories shared with him by nine families in the U.S. and abroad. From a Venetian palazzo to Oprah Winfrey’s home in Montecito, California, Brent thoughtfully distills what makes spaces special to those who reside in them, offering inspiration and aspiration to readers who appreciate “the beauty of intention and connection, perception and memory, ceremony and ritual—and most importantly, of life and love.”

Jeremiah Brent’s sumptuous The Space That Keeps You offers “inspiration and aspiration” to help you fall in love with your home.

An astonishing 30-40% of food goes to waste in the U.S. “As well as being financially foolish, wasting food damages the planet because it accelerates climate change,” notes food writer and cookbook author Sue Quinn in her latest cookbook, Second Helpings: Delicious Dishes to Transform Your Leftovers, which aims to keep food from our own kitchens out of the trash. Quinn kicks off with a chapter of recipes for base dishes (soup, pasta bake, risotto, to name a few) that teach the reader skills that can be used for everyday meals. She moves to sections on small plates, light meals, main meals, sweet things and bits and bobs, the last of which includes ways to incorporate leftovers such as mashed potatoes, salad greens and the spoonfuls and scrapings left in various types of jarred foods.The book’s structure gives many different options for each recipe, resulting in numerous dishes to use up the items you have on hand. I made the roast dinner enchiladas using some cooked chicken from the night before, sliced peppers and jarred tomatoes, which transformed into an amazing sauce when simmered with Quinn’s suggested mix of spices. Second Helpings is the perfect blueprint for repurposing leftover food into other nutritious, delicious meals.

Second Helpings is the perfect blueprint for repurposing leftover food into other nutritious, delicious meals.
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When I was 18, I found myself living on my own and quickly discovered that I didn’t know how to do it. It was hunger that finally motivated me to seek help in the form of an adult figure I trusted: Martha Stewart. I gamely subscribed to her magazine, and in the intervening decades, what began as an attempt to receive simple instruction on how to cook myself a hamburger has metastasized into a person who is completely inflexible about leaving dishes in the sink, the laundry schedule and cleaning the upholstery.

This self is very stressed. She is also, in a suspicion I hold at the very edges of my consciousness, scary and unpleasant.

Upon first cracking the cover of Alison Throckmorton’s The Good Enough Guide to Better Living: Leave Your Dishes in the Sink, Serve Your Guests Leftovers, and Make the Most Out of Doing the Least at Home, it felt clear that I would simply have to take this funny little book as tongue in cheek, have a laugh and be done with it. It was best not to overexamine why the section on leaving the dishes to soak ad infinitum gave me a small muscle spasm.

Throckmorton’s great success with this book, through all the quippy humor and highly designed pages, is to hilariously reorient the home as the place where living happens. The dishes are dirty because you used them, and have remained dirty because your life is full—whether it is full of children, of friends or of Netflix is beside the point. The bedside table is cluttered with items because the bed is cozy, and having everything you need at arm’s length will allow you to stay there for as long as possible. When entertaining friends, who cares if the canapes are made with saltines if you’re having fun? Macaroni and cheese is an infinitely flexible dish; we wouldn’t eat fistfuls of carbs and shredded cheese if it wasn’t delicious.

I would not say that Throckmorton has made me a convert. But I will say that I let the dishes “soak” for two hours while I watched “The Buccaneers” under a blanket. That’s saying something.

The Good Enough Guide to Better Living cheerfully encourages us to let our houses look like people are living in them—dirty dishes and all.
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Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoirs Persepolis and Persepolis II—and the Oscar-nominated film adapted from the books—tell the story of the author-illustrator’s coming of age in 1980s Iran. Her new work is concerned with the life of another young Iranian woman, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested, detained and severely beaten because some of her hair escaped her headscarf in 2022. Civilian protests erupted in Iran and were quickly taken up elsewhere, the movement’s slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” echoing around the world.

Satrapi’s new graphic anthology, Woman, Life, Freedom, presents the story of the titular movement through short graphic vignettes. The project pairs artists with experts on Iran: Satrapi herself, plus two journalists and an Iranian-born Stanford University professor. These experts composed the words that accompany each of the 23 vignettes, which are divided among three sections that detail Amini’s death and the aftermath; contextualize the events in light of late 20th-century revolutions; and explore everyday life in Iran today, where tensions increasingly show a divide between the ruling party and the people. The vignettes demonstrate the complexity of interactions among residents: State-sanctioned violence, surveillance and propaganda foment confusion and sow mistrust among neighbors. The predominant culture is one of fear.

Some of the graphic illustrations in Woman, Life, Freedom read like political cartoons, while others offer intimate scenes of daily life. The styles reflect the individuality of the creators—swooping, impressionistic, single-color and frameless illustrations exist alongside framed, sequenced, multicolor ones. In all cases, the visual medium enhances the storytelling and creates an immersive reading experience that accessibly communicates information. In my favorite vignettes, such as “In the Heart of the Diaspora,” I felt like I was eavesdropping on conversations that felt both familiar and incredibly complex, much as I felt while reading Persepolis.

Satrapi’s memoirs were widely praised for creating complex images of Iran that probed the subjective, everyday experiences of people living there. She brings the same ability to relate to readers here. She writes in her preface that an aim of the book is to “remind Iranians that they are not alone.” The anthology is being published in many languages for distribution around the world and made freely available online in Persian for Iranian readers. Woman, Life, Freedom offers a look at the human toll of an authoritarian regime, and a people’s heroic, ongoing movement against it.

Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi’s new anthology offers a look at the human toll of Iran’s authoritarian regime, and a people’s heroic, ongoing movement against it.

A little black box appears on health care and employment forms, census surveys and other official documents, requiring respondents to confine their racial identity to a single space that allows no fine distinctions. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in his eloquent and powerful The Black Box: Writing the Race, such boxes are metaphors for the insidious and perfidious ways in which Black Americans have seen their identities prescribed by a nation that has suppressed their freedom since its very foundation.

The Black Box commits to the page a series of lectures Gates delivers in his Harvard University introductory course in African American Studies. Here, the prolific scholar demonstrates that various Black writers from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, among many others, challenged what Du Bois called the “suffocating confinement” of the metaphorical black box, and wrote their own stories about how to escape from it and forge identities that recognize their humanity.

The notion that for Black people, liberation and literacy have been inextricable is a foundation of the lectures. One hundred and two formerly enslaved people wrote book-length narratives, “the largest body of literature ever created in the history of the world by persons who had been enslaved,” notes Gates. These writers “fought back against the discourse of race and reason by creating their own genre of literature.” Slave narratives combined autobiographies with attacks on the dehumanizing and murderous effects of slavery, often becoming seminal texts for abolitionists.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Du Bois developed the philosophy of the New Negro, a metaphor, Gates writes, that was “a powerful construct, like an empty vessel or signifier that different—and even contradictory—ideologies” could fill. By the time of the Harlem Renaissance, writers such as Hurston and Hughes, as well as jazz musicians and other artists, captured the multiplicity of voices within African American communities, illustrating the rich diversity of the Black experience.

The Black Box requires that readers rethink the ways we talk about race in America today. Gates’ passionate and compelling prose, and the book’s lucid details and insights, lay the historical and artistic groundwork for such conversations.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s passionate and compelling The Black Box documents the ways in which American writers have illustrated the rich diversity of the Black experience.

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