A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces―death, violence, estrangement―come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.

A preeminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems. With selections from five acclaimed volumes along with three dozen new poems, Razzle Dazzle traces the evolution of Jackson’s transformative imagination and fierce music. Whether addressing racial conflict and the ongoing struggle for human dignity in America, bearing witness to the plight of refugees, or grieving the contradictory nature of humankind, these dexterous poems proclaim the remarkable power of renewal, justice, and accountability.

Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was a giant of twentieth-century literature, not least because he lived through and wrote about many of the most extreme events of that extreme century, from the world wars and the Holocaust to the Cold War. Over a seven-decade career, he produced an important body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including classics such as The Captive Mind, a reflection on the hypnotic power of ideology, and Native Realm, a memoir. In this book, Eva Hoffman, like Miłosz a Polish-born writer who immigrated to the West, presents an eloquent personal portrait of the life and work of her illustrious fellow exile.

In these essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation, where some of the descendants of those formerly enslaved lived into the 1990s; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down. Together, these groundbreaking essays build a profound vision for how to see and experience the world in our present moment, and how to strive toward an alternative existence in intentional community underground.

When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage. For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. Despite this, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.

The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling. On the one hand, these fabulous fables, American sonnets, quarantine quatrains, and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas animate what Toni Morrison called “the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race.” On the other hand, these urgent, personal poems contemplate fatherhood, history, and longing with remarkable openness and humanity. 

Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. "If you don't see suffering's potential as art, will it remain suffering?" he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes's astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet's routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.

Celia del Pino, the matriarch of a far-flung Cuban family, has watched her descendants spread out across the globe, struggling to make sense of their transnational identities and strained relationships with one another. In Berlin, the charismatic yet troubled Ivanito performs on stage as his drag queen persona; Pilar Puente, adrift in Los Angeles, is a struggling sculptor and the single mother of a young son. In Moscow, Ivanito’s cousin Irina has become the wealthy owner of a lingerie company. Meanwhile, in Havana, Celia prepares to reunite with her lost lover, Gustavo. Cut off from their Cuban roots, yet still feeling the island’s ineluctable pull, Ivanito and his extended family try to reimagine where—and with whom—they belong. 

It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. 1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney’s endearingly violent partner in crime. 1976.  Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. When a fire severely injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.

Becky Nurse is an outspoken, sharp-witted tour guide at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft who’s just trying to get by in post-Obama America. She’s also the descendant of Rebecca Nurse, who was infamously executed for witchcraft in 1692—but things have changed for women since then…haven’t they? After losing her job for calling out The Crucible in front of schoolkids, Becky visits a local witch for help. One spell leads to another, and then everything really goes off the rails. A darkly comic play about a woman coming to terms with her family’s legacy and finding her voice in the “lock her up” era.