"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era" quickly became one of my favorite nonfiction books written by a journalist. I appreciated how he showed the grueling, day-to-day work local journalism requires, and how many layers of people fought him in revealing the despicable work of the Ku Klux Klan.
Addie Citchens reads her story 'The City Is a Graveyard,' from the March 16, 2026, issue of the magazine. Citchens is a Mississippi Delta-born, New Orleans-based writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, 'Dominion,' was published in 2025 and was short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and long-listed for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize.
This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror, which inspired the well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition.
I sat down at my computer really angry, she tells me. It was the 1990s, the time of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson report's finding of institutional racism within the Metropolitan police. It was my way of channelling that anger.
I've been writing both poetry and short stories since I was a child, but I first began to think of myself as a writer when my 11th-grade English teacher encouraged me to lean in. I started to take my craft seriously in college, majoring in English with a focus on creative writing. By the time I graduated in the mid-1990s, I considered myself a poet.
From the outset, in the novel's prologue, Anna tells us she is determined to account for herself and her life. But we are to expect no ordinary narrative, concerned only with actual events, evidence-based or relying on historical data. No, Anna is interested in the climate of the psyche and the vibrations of the soul. Can it be that the very things we cannot quantify or rationalise are what make life meaningful?
Enrigue's 'penchant for shooting the facts of history through the prism of the absurd' makes him singular-but it also puts him firmly in a long literary tradition. The book 'distills a byzantine swirl of historical events through the lives of a handful of very colorful characters,' intertwining several real and invented incidents with major moments in the Apache Wars, a series of skirmishes involving Native Americans, the U.S., and Mexico across the Southwest borderlands.
Everything, no matter how broken or aged, is precious because of the people who touched it, used it, abandoned it. When the new owners plan to replace the carpet with an exact replica, Maximus laughs: the original, he tells us, is fifty per cent Gilbert DNA—and the scurf of fifteen beloved Labradors and one Miniature Schnauzer with dermatitis.
At the same time, the narrator is taken with her new colleague, Vlad, who is married to fellow professor Cynthia. One day, the narrator and her adult daughter, Sid, follow John's car and see him meeting with Cynthia at the school. Believing that they're having an affair, the narrator resolves to act on her obsession with Vlad.
There will be two books within a very short span. It's just the story that was finally ready to come out of me was big, really, really, really big. One of these books will be so big it will need to be bound as a set of two, so the story will occupy three physical volumes. But it's like one thing altogether, that no amount of glue in any publisher's factory could ever hold this.
I have the rights back to everything now. And getting the rights back to all my things has been a big part of my journey in recent years. I look at any TV or movie adaptation as another facet of the worlds I've created, and it's something I want to be in charge of.
In 1968, a "good girl" is squeaky clean. She studies hard, follows the rules, gets into college and doesn't embarrass her parents. She doesn't lie or drink or do drugs. She doesn't participate in the Summer of Love or experiment with any of its alternative ways of living. She definitely doesn't have premarital sex, get pregnant and upend everyone's meticulously laid plans for her future.
I do think that the three books, as a trilogy, it's Shane who has like the hero's arc. I think, even in The Long Game, it's Shane. As much as the book focuses on Ilya, Shane is the one with that arc, and I do think that continues into this one [Unrivaled].
If you have to read and reread in order to put together what's happening, then you are a co-creator of that literary experience. She saw this as specifically important for Black literature. Her highest aspiration, as she put it, was to create something at the level of jazz, which she saw as the highest form of Black art.
Her writing tends to be classified as virkelighetslitteratur, or "reality fiction," and for good reason. Hjorth makes Norway sound like a small town-the sort of place where your neighbors know you're home if they can see your footsteps in the snow-and the overlap between her life and work has more than once been the literary version of tabloid news there.
I wanted to write a book about how the smartphone changed the world, but the more I researched, the clearer it became that phones were actually the latest step in this evolution of storytelling technology that stretches all the way back to prehistoric times.
Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara's bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul.
Everybody wants to flourish-to experience joyful, meaningful, shared growth. The problem is, we've been trained to approach the most important parts of our lives as if they are games to win, when they're more like gardens to be grown. Flourishing isn't about being smarter-it's about taking simple actions that foster the ecosystem of your life.
Research has linked reading for pleasure in childhood to a host of positive educational and socioeconomic outcomes. But now 14 years after the Department for Education, in a more innocent time, commissioned a chunky report on the matter—reading books for pleasure is an activity in crisis. The culprit usually blamed for this falling-off is the smartphone and its many short-term distractions; the mere presence of a smartphone in the room, recent research suggests, has an impact on our ability to concentrate.
It was another detail that the rest of the family apparently knew but had never told me; they thought I already knew. The biology mattered less to me than the secret. Dad had been adopted, it turned out. A classic affliction of the 1950s, in which young, unmarried couples were forced to give away their newborn babies.
I've done more books now, I think, than Shakespeare, sort of. I had a right laugh writing my first book, and people liked it, so when the chance to write another came up, I thought why not? I've got even more mad tales to tell.
My husband and I had two children and lost them both. Vincent, 16, enjoyed baking, while 19-year-old James was a brilliant linguist and a deep thinker. Shortly before Vincent's death, Li had written a memoir about her depressive episodes which led to her own suicide attempts.
