THE CITY WE BECAME by NK Jemisin is a romp. In this world, cities that become old enough and distinct enough achieve consciousness — and appoint a human avatar to defend their borders and their peoples. When New York reaches its maturity, however, the process goes bad. An eldritch threat…

I grew up 20 minutes from the nearest grocery store. My childhood bedroom, in an old farmhouse, belonged to my dad when he was a kid. I didn’t have cable TV until about the time I started taking college visits. But I never once felt constricted by my surroundings. …

BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF by Marlon James is the kind of book that requires a bit of commitment. Midway through, there’s a point where one character says that the narrator’s “account continues to perplex even those of uncommon mind.” But James rewards you for the effort with a world that’s…

ASYMMETRY by Lisa Halliday is a story told in two parts — the first, a charming roman à clef set in New York and the second, a voice-driven narrative about life under conflict in Iraq. Listening for the echoes between those two narratives, what connects them, is a thrill. You’ll…

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO by George Saunders is a novel about President Lincoln coming to terms with the death of his 11-year-old son in the midst of the Civil War. The narrative is conveyed through two distinct threads. The first features the voices of the ghosts of Oak Hill Cemetery…

EVICTED by Matthew Desmond is a vivid, powerful piece of policy reporting that drops us into the lives of a series of families desperate to make ends meet in working-class Milwaukee. Central to this book is the idea that eviction is a cause (not just a condition) of poverty. And…

I came to Washington, DC in 2005 — just a few months after Barack Obama was sworn into office as the junior senator from Illinois. I had just graduated from college, was ready to tackle the world, and had only the vaguest sense of what it would take to be…

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a fully-charged, wholly-realized argument about where we stand as a society on the question of race — a searing, powerful, emotional memoir of what it means to grow up black in America. It takes the form of a series of letters…

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a fully-charged, wholly-realized argument about where we stand as a society on the question of race — a searing, powerful, emotional memoir of what it means to grow up black in America. It takes the form of a series of letters…