Margaret Renkl’s name was already familiar to readers in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was the founding editor of the online literary publication Chapter 16, and to readers of the New York Times, where she is a contributing opinion writer. But when her memoir, Late Migrations, was published in 2019, Renkl’s celebration of the natural world and family drew praise from reviewers, readers and popular book club facilitators nationwide.

Graceland, At Last gathers a selection of Renkl’s columns from the past four years, inviting loyal readers and newcomers alike to take in Renkl’s perspective on the world. The collection is organized thematically, touching on topics present in Late Migrations and others such as politics, religion, social justice, arts and culture.

These essays can be read with their original contexts in mind, thanks to the inclusion of their publication dates. For example, in “Hawk. Lizard. Mole. Human.,” Renkl writes of “days that grow ever darker as fears gather and autumn comes on.” The column, published in August 2020, may remind today’s readers of the spike in COVID-19 cases that occured in the fall of 2020. But the columns hold up equally well without the recollection of where you were when they were first written.

Renkl often finds gifts in the mundane, such as in a power outage caused by storms, recounted in “The Night the Lights Went Out.” But her concern about the precariousness of our environment never wanes, showing up even in the midst of this celebration of the simplicity of a few days without power.

Whether extolling the wonders of a rattlesnake or lamenting Southern Christians’ support of oppressive policies, Renkl engages with her home region’s beauty and complexity. As she writes in the introduction, “To love the South is to see with clear eyes both its terrible darkness and its dazzling light, and to spend a lifetime trying to make sense of both.”

White Magic is divine, incantatory, a riddle, an illusion. In Elissa Washuta’s hands, this collection becomes more than the sum of its parts. The subjects of these essays are parts of a bigger story—like a spell with the intention to make whole what has been wounded. Readers of Washuta’s two previous nonfiction books will recognize some of the same terrain, but this collection creates a new narrative, a reckoning with healing and with growing up.

White Magic begins with Washuta's urgent desire to decolonize witchcraft and other spiritual practices. For example, the Native American practice of smudging with white sage has been commodified so thoroughly that sage bundles were recently offered for sale at Sephora. Washuta, who is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, wishes for “a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder,” although she doubts whether such a thing exists.

Tapping into her roots, Washuta explores the ecology of the Seattle region through Native mythology, as well as the history of the region’s colonization by white settlers. Multiple essays focus on the legacy of sexual violence against Native women, contextualized through Washuta’s own harrowing experiences. These essays move deftly between the personal, cultural and historical to create resonances across time.

Some of the best essays in White Magic are the most intimate, especially the ones that wrestle with the piercing sorrow of romantic attachment. Why do we love those who cannot love us back—or worse, who might kill us? Under Washuta’s dexterous touch, these questions gain symbolic weight through nuanced excursions into pop culture, from Stevie Nicks and “Twin Peaks” to the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. These subjects might sound disparate, but Washuta’s gift for weaving metaphorical strands across essays creates a strikingly harmonious narrative whole.

What does it mean to find work that you love? To make a home in one city only to move somewhere else for a job? To be friends—real friends—in adulthood? Jonny Sun approaches these questions in his new book, Goodbye, Again. Composed of dozens of short essays and illustrations, Sun’s captivating and immersive book invites readers to listen in as he thinks aloud on the page. 

This book is at once sad and hopeful. It’s sad about the cultural pressure to be constantly working. It’s sad about the inevitability of change. It’s sad about the many ways we say goodbye to each other, whether ending a visit or moving away. But it’s also attentive to life and movement in unlikely places. For example, Sun contemplates house plants—their small leaves, tilting to water and warmth. They need the right kind of care for life to take root, and even when a plant seems to die, it can in fact be growing in a different direction.

Through descriptions like these, the reader feels Sun’s desire for renewal. The book is hopeful as it shows how little moments from the past, something as simple as cooking an egg, can reverberate in the present. In this way, we never really say goodbye. We are still together, still remembering each other in small daily ways.

To spend time with this book is to spend time in the private world of a creative, sensitive person who finds life inviting, beautiful and rich, but also overwhelming, scary and exhausting. Goodbye, Again acknowledges the crushing constancy and anxiety of work, but it also celebrates the joy of creating something where nothing was before—the pleasure of being totally immersed in work and the way that work can make us come alive. By acknowledging both sides of this reality in gentle and specific ways, Sun ultimately gives his readers license to experience their own contradictions and to be fully human.