Article Archive: Feature

In his first nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed, published in June by Little, Brown, poet and scholar Clint Smith delves into the legacy of slavery alive in the monuments and landmarks within and beyond the United States, in an immersive read that exquisitely depicts how a nation and its inhabitants remember its history. 

In her new essay collection, World of Wonders, poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil turns her creative powers of attention, play, openness, and love to a world of magic and imagination outdoors. 

Ben George, a senior editor at Little, Brown who works with some of the biggest names in literary fiction and nonfiction, talks about the author-editor relationship, the plight of the midlist writer, and the art of revision. 

Our annual debut fiction roundup features novelists Ruchika Tomar, Chia-Chia Lin, Miciah Bay Gault, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, and Regina Porter. 

Fifteen years in the making, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is a dramatic masterwork, a parable-in-poems that confronts the darkness of war and terror with the blazing light of  “a poet in love with the world.”

In our third annual installment of this series, five authors over the age of fifty who published their debut books this year—Jeanne McCulloch, A. G. Lombardo, Anne Youngson, Maw Shein Win, and Laura Esther Wolfson—share their paths to publication.

In his sixth book, a sonnet sequence published by Penguin in June, Terrance Hayes cuts deep, to the marrow of the American moment, in a form with a razor’s edge: love poems for the forces trying to kill you.

Poet, publisher, editor, and activist Carmen Giménez Smith, whose fifth book, Cruel Futures, is out from City Lights, has some advice for other hardworking poets: We make art to reach readers, not to win a race. 

Novelists Caroline Leavitt and Jonathan Evison discuss the books that just didn’t work.