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The best short films of all time were hard to find in days past. But now, with YouTube, they're only just a click away!

Making a short film can be your ticket into creating a name for yourself in Hollywood. It feels like all content these days are getting shorter and shorter. When you look at streamers like Quibi, they're creating content that's fifteen minutes long, maximum. But this is not a new idea, even Stanley Kubrick saw the future of entertainment as short films.

And even Netflix released Love, Death, and Robots as a series built on short interpretations of the future.

We've covered how to write a short film, so today I want to highlight 50+ of the best short films on YouTube. Watching them can inspire you to be a better filmmaker.

So without further ado...

I perused the internet and tried to pick some of the best short films available. If you know of others, please leave them in the comments and I will add them. I sorted them via film genre to make it easier. This is not a ranking, just a list of resources. I'm excited to hear what you think and hope it starts a discussion.

All information for loglines and credits from IMDB.

Logline: A girl tells the story of her life and hopes for the future.

Directed by Brian Percival

Written by Julie Rutterford

Logline: An office worker meets the girl of his dreams and uses a fleet of paper airplanes to get her attention.

Directed by Jon Kahrs

Written by Clio Chiang, Kendelle Hoyer

Logline: Dawn is a quiet young teenager who longs for something or someone to free her from her sheltered life.

Directed by Rose McGowan

Written by M.A. Fortin, Joshua John Miller

Logline: A fable about a parking attendant who gives his customers REAL validation -- dispensing both free parking and free compliments.

Directed & Written by Kurt Kuenne

Logline: The odd biography of a man who has Tourette's Syndrome, chronic bad luck, menial jobs, nudist tendencies, and a book of "fakts" hung around his neck

Directed & Written by Adam Elliot

Logline: In this day-in-the-life piece, a young, interracial couple explore their relationship on a quiet Saturday in Brooklyn.

Directed & Written by Barry Jenkins

Logline: Zoë is a single mother who lives with her four children in Dartford. She is poor and can't afford to buy food. One day her ex-boyfriend drives by and asks her to go on a date with him. Scared that he doesn't want to go out with her, she lies and tells him that she is just babysitting the kids. This will be her first date in years.

Directed & Written by Andrea Arnold

Logline: Young ten-year-old Daisy hates dresses. She much prefers her brother Jude's loose-fitting clothing. Her favorite nail polish is a black Sharpie. It's the Fourth of July and the two have been left alone to watch fireworks on TV while their mother goes on a date. But the older teens Hunter and Ryan lure the siblings out of the house for a night full of pranks, trouble and a moral quandary.

Directed & Written by Erin Sanger

Logline: Welcome to the awkward sexually charged silence of teenage life.

Directed by Milena Pastreich

Written by Ana Lily Amirpour

Logline: After he gets out of the toilets, a man is being chased by a human-sized turd, claiming to be the man's child. "Why have you abandoned me?" is the question the turd keeps on asking. First, the man is embarrassed by the annoying presence of the turd, then he slowly accepts it alongside him...

Directed & Written by Michel Gondry

Logline: Jimmy Arnaud eulogizes his mother.

Directed & Written by Jim Cummings

Logline: Zsofi is struggling to fit in at her new school - singing in the school's famous choir is her only consolation, but the choir director may not be the inspirational teacher everyone thinks she is. It will take Zsofi and her new friend Liza to uncover the cruel truth.

Director - Kristof Deák

Screenplay - Kristof Deák, Christian Azzola, Bex Harvey

Logline: Captures three occurrences in a young girl's life that leave her with a heavy heart.

Directed & Written by Lynne Ramsay

Logline: Life is simple. Why complicate it?

Directed & Written by Vignesh Venugopal

Logline: Is it right to be treated as a weirdo just because you are Death incarnate? Even Death has feelings, and God forbid, even Death may die.

Directed & Written by Mark Dubiniec

Logline: In the tradition of classic westerns, a narrator sets up the story of a lone gunslinger who walks into a saloon. However, the people in this saloon can hear the narrator and the narrator may just be a little bit bloodthirsty.

Directed by Eric Kissack

Written by Kevin Tenglin

Logline: A lyrical portrait of 'Taco', a young urban cowboy struggling with the death of his best friend.

Directed & Written by Christina Choe

Logline: Around the classic 1800's Western campfire, Slope and Tar tangle about what's been, what will be, and who may or may not survive the first New Age chat in the Old West.

Directed & Written by Jeff Lester

Logline: A group of women band together as they go to war against a pack of men who have done them wrong at every turn.

Directed & Written by Courtney Hoffman

Logline: A classic revenge tale begins in a schoolyard and ends at the heart of the modern frontier.

Directed & Written by Peter Edlund

Logline: A short film musical narrative in the style of Americana folklore.

Directed by Brandom McCormick

Written by Brandom McCormick, Nicholas Kirk, Charlie Wetzel

Logline: A young mercenary is hired to kill Death.

Directed & Written by Edson Oda

Logline: A short film about riding the elevator.

Directed & Written by Greg Glienna

Logline: In a dusty Texas bar, a chatty stranger insists on striking up a conversation with the man sitting next to him. The more this out-of-towner talks, the more obvious it is he's not from 'round here. Heck, he's not even from this planet! Based on the short story by Joe R. Lansdale.

Directed by Lowell Northrop

Written by Joe R. Lansdale

Logline: A down-on-his-luck boy finds love in the most unexpected way.

Directed & Written by Cameron Covell

Logline: Upon hitting puberty, a high-school boy realizes he is homosexual and faces prejudice from his parents and friends.

Directed by Peggy Rajski

Written by James Lecesne, Bruce Vilanch

Logline: A black and bloody Irish comedy about a sad train journey where an older man, whose wife has died that morning, encounters a strange and possibly psychotic young oddball....

Directed & Written by Martin McDonough

Logline: A man falls in love while in a subway station.

Directed & Written by Philippe Orreindy

Logline: A nosy neighbor, a drug dealer, and an angry husband make for a move-in day that two men will never forget.

Directed by Jaochim Back

Written by Anders Thomas Jensen (original screenplay "De Nye Lejere"), David Rakoff (adaptation)

Logline: A short film about the problems that accompany an actor as he auditions, due to his multi-ethnic appearance.

Directed & Written by Vin Diesel

Logline: A paraplegic man leaves home to be on his own.

Directed & Written by Janicza Bravo

Logline: A vexed screenwriter, an elusive woman and the thin line between fact and fiction.

Directed by Brandon Polanco

Written by Brandon Polanco, Spenser Granese (co-writer)

Logline: A celebrity meets a person at the airport. All is fine until the person finds out that if they return home, they will be arrested.

Directed by Vladimir Shcherban

Written by Nikolai Khalezin, Laura Wade

Logline: A man travels back in time to force his 10-year-old self to learn guitar so that he can get more action with the ladies in the present day.

Directed by Lucas Testro

Written by Larry Boxshall

Logline: Sarah wakes up to find herself hanging upside down. As she screams for help a phone rings and the person, on the other hand, helps her escape. Is all as it seems to be?

Directed by Georgina Higgins, Lee Jones

Written by Georgina Higgins

Logline: A short futuristic film featuring Augmented reality and Gamification. by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo. This is a graduation project from Bezaleal academy of arts.

Directed by Daniel Lazo (co-director), Eran May-Raz (co-director)

Written by Natalie Doten (narration)

Logline: A father's desperate attempt to come to terms with the devastating effects of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Directed & Written by Juanita Wilson

Logline: Last night's leftovers are presented with a cold reality. A massive ice block has invaded the refrigerator and is swallowing the food one item at a time. In an epic struggle for their survival, Spaghetti, Ham Sandwich, and Celery embark on a journey to the refrigerator's temperature control knob.

Directed by Dave Green

Written by Daniel Hartley

Logline: A sci-fi film about Africa in the future, 35 years after World War III, the water war.

Directed & Written by Wanuri Kahiu

Logline: A housemaid robot in the near future begins to adapt to the world around it.

Directed & Written by Courtney Marsh

Logline: A young boy living in the near future looks for an escape from a home with arguing parents. As a way to cope with the recent arguments from his parents he receives a robot companion that he ends up abusing.

Directed & Written by Ruairi Robinson

Logline: It's 2618 and humans are extinct. Four aliens travel to Earth to visit the museum of humanity. There they find the story of the last heroes of humanity, setting out to find help.

Directed & Written by Daan van 't Einde

Logline: When you are all alone in a small dark room, what do you fear the most? Is it the temporary blindness or is it the uneasy deep feeling that someone, or rather something, is observing your every move?

Directed & Written by David Sandberg

Logline: Alex asks his father to tuck him in, but that's not the only thing he asks for.

Directed by Ignacio F. Rodó

Written by Juan J. Ruiz (based on a story by), Ignacio Rodó (adaptation) (as Ignacio F. Rodó)

Logline: A pill-popping, over-caffeinated driver accidentally hits something. Panic-stricken, he searches for help in a strange and desolate town that offers very little in the form of human kindness.

Directed by Jon Knautz

Written by Charles Kohnston

Logline: Stranded in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, a man sets in motion an unlikely plan to protect his infant daughter.

Directed by Ben Howling, Yolanda Ramke

Written by Yolanda Ramke

Logline: A clique of school girls devises a secret plan that they code-name "Lick the Star".

Directed by Sofia Coppola

Written by Sofia Coppola, Stephanie Hayman

Logline: A bullied schoolboy takes drastic measures against his tormenter, summoning an ancient being in the woods using a spellbound book passed down through the generations of his family.

Directed & Written by Ben Franklin and Anthony Melton

Logline: The purchase of a mystery Jigsaw Puzzle from a strange and unsettling vendor leads a man to an evening of frightening consequences.

Directed & Written by Basil and Rashad Al-Safar

Logline: A short tale about the demons that slumber deep in the human soul and have the power to push people into the abyss of blind hate, fury and rage.

Directed & Written by Dameon Nenow

Logline: Liam (Liam Cunningham) and Michael (Michael Fassbender) are professional safe crackers who meet on a simple job to relieve an office safe from its contents. The catch is a light activated ... See full summary "

Directed & Written by John MacLean

Logline: Italy, September 1955. A Formula One driver crashes his car during a race, leaving him stuck in a small village but good surprises will come his way.

Directed & Written by Wes Anderson

Logline: Police chase an armed criminal in a version of Los Angeles comprised entirely of corporate logos.

Directed by François Alaux & Hervé de Crécy & Ludovic Houplain

Written by François Alaux...(screenplay) & Hervé de Crécy...(screenplay) & Ludovic Houplain...(screenplay) Gregory J. Pruss...(dialogue)

Logline: A struggling actor and director finally crack under the pressures of navigating the entertainment business.

Directed & Written by Gil Freston

Logline: Agent 327 is investigating a clue that leads him to a shady barbershop in Amsterdam. Little does he know that he is being tailed by mercenary Boris Kloris.

Directed by Hjalti Hjalmarsson (co-director), Colin Levy (co-director)

Written by Martin Lodewijk (based on comics by)

Logline: A short war movie.

Directed by Kristof Brandl

Written by Shane Patrick

I hope you were able to take a ton of inspiration away from this post and list. All these films are worth checking out, and as I mentioned above, please let me know about some other ones you love. I'd love to grow this list to the 100 best short films on YouTube.

Feel free to post links to your own work - I can't wait to see how our community works together to produce more amazing short films!

Chances are you're reading No Film School because you're not only obsessed with Hollywood, but you want to be a part of it. But breaking in is never easy. That's why I think writing short films and even making them yourself, has become a viable option for breaking into the business.

Click the link for more!

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What are the 50+ Best Short Films of All Time on YouTube?

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The best short films of all time were hard to find in days past. But now, with YouTube, they're only just a click away! Making a short film can be your ticket into creating a name for yourself in Hollywood. It feels like all content these days are getting shorter and shorter.

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Watch the most innovative stories-Documentary, Comedy, Sci-fi, Horror, Experimental, Animation, Inspiration, Student films, Award winners & more short films

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Film is a powerful pathway to learning, reflection and connection.

Stream 20+ films, specially curated from our UnLonely Film Festival archives.

Welcome to the UnLonely Film Festival: Best of Fest. This is where you can stream stand-out short films from past seasons of the festival. We're featuring diverse stories from those experiencing-and in many cases, overcoming-the challenges of loneliness and isolation. Through these films, we hope you'll find inspiration, enjoyment, and the opportunity to creatively connect with yourself and others here within our UnLonely Project community.

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Welcome to the UnLonely Film Festival: Best of Fest. This is where you can stream stand-out short films from past seasons of the festival. We're featuring diverse stories from those experiencing-and in many cases, overcoming-the challenges of loneliness and isolation.

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At Pixar, we LOVE shorts! In fact, our first ventures in storytelling through film were with short films and commercials. Beginning with Luxo Jr., shorts have allowed us to tell stories in different ways than our feature films, but often with just as much emotional impact.

Innovative storytelling has always been at the core of Pixar's foundation, and our shorts allow the freedom to experiment and develop both new ways to tell stories and new technologies - many of which often then go on to be used in our feature films. Just as important, our short films also allow us to cultivate the next generation of storytellers here at the studio, letting individuals work on smaller teams and often hold leadership positions for the first time.

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At Pixar, we LOVE shorts! In fact, our first ventures in storytelling through film were with short films and commercials. Beginning with Luxo Jr., shorts have allowed us to tell stories in different ways than our feature films, but often with just as much emotional impact.

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With a panel of celebrated authors, TIME presents the most compelling, enlightening and influential YA books of all time, dating back to the 1800s

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Best Books for Those Who Dislike Reading

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Best Books for Those Who Dislike Reading

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"Let's get out our [independent/book club/whole class] books and open to page __!"

At least one student in the room experiences a shudder of disdain and a wave of despondency each time such words are uttered (many more students are likely experiencing this emotional response to the dread of reading on the inside).

Why Do Students Hate Reading?

Some students are revolted by the prospect of reading. Several common findings show up from teachers' reports:

They haven't found a book, author, or genre yet that they like, and they don't know where to begin

They would prefer to occupy their time with different forms of media or more kinesthetic activities

They find reading boring - not long after they start reading, they lose track of their place, get annoyed by having to reread difficult passages, or tune out when the author goes on and on about seemingly insignifcant details

They have been 'forced' to read books in middle school that they didn't enjoy, either because the books were neither interesting, relevant, nor accessible

Their grades in ELA are somewhat dependent on scores from AR (accelerated reader) tests/quizzes, the questions of which mainly prompt students to recall basic information about the plot

Here's the thing - all of these reasons are totally valid. It can be physically and mentally challenging to decode a text that may be full of difficult vocabulary, unfamiliar cultural references, background/historical knowledge, and more. It can be emotionally straining to tackle controversial or sensitive topics. Additionally, teachers who engage students in reading through whole-class novels alone (as opposed to including independent reading or smaller book club groups) risk isolating and turning off readers for the sake of what feels like efficiency. At some point between elementary school and high school, many students fall out of love with reading, an act that used to involve play and imagination and risk and creativity and fun. Add in multiple-choice exams and reading timelines and annotations, and the magic is understandably less apparent.

InWhat I Tell Students When They Say They Don't Like to Read, Terry Heick shares with a hypothetical student: "If you say you 'hate reading,' that means you hate ideas and emotions. Feeling things. Exploring things. Achieving things. Next time you say you hate reading, say instead, 'I hate feeling things,' or 'I hate stories and ideas written with words on pieces of paper that can help me achieve anything I've dreamed and can help me dream if I haven't.'"

Such a statement might warrant a good chuckle to a student who is struggling with reading. As educators, sharing one's own challenges with reading - as a child, teen, and adult - can help reluctant readers feel like they're less alone and reduce the pressure to appear like they're engaged in a book they can't stand. What comes next? An awesome book to reignite enjoyment in reading. Here's where we can help.

We've compiled a list of 33 of the best books for students who don't like to read. How did these books make it onto our list?

The books are often told by multiple narrators

The books are written by diverse authors

The books are written in different forms

The books are accessible for readers of all levels

The books touch on topics that are relevant to students' lives today

The books touch on topics that adults often try to shield teens from reading (even though teens are experiencing them vicariously or in real life)

Upon finishing these books, students are likely to ask an ELA teacher's five favorite words, "What should I read next?" The great thing about these books is that many of them are part of a series, many are written by authors who have since published additional books, and many can act as a bridge to a new genre (like historical fiction, mystery, poetry, or memoir). The more a student can find and read books that are enjoyable and meaningful, the more confident they will become in identifying books they think they will like.

We hope these books are catalysts for your students and for teachers, who might benefit from venturing outside of the traditional canon and experimenting with new ways of fostering a love of reading in their classes.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to products. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Read more about our policy here.

The Best Books for Students Who Don't Like to Read

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The 33 Best Books For Students Who Don't Like To Read

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"Let's get out our [independent/book club/whole class] books and open to page __!" At least one student in the room experiences a shudder of disdain and a wave of despondency each time such words are uttered (many more students are likely experiencing this emotional response to the dread of reading on the inside).

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One of the best parts of working at a magazine? The piles of books that arrive months before the rest of the world gets to see them. The year may only be a few months old, but we have been reading far beyond to give you a taste of the best books so far and to come. Check back for more updates as we continue to fill our shelves!

Jean Chen Ho's debut collection of linked stories about the lives and loves of two friends spanning decades evokes a distinctive multi-ethnic Asian American experience coming of age in Los Angeles in the late 20th century: R&B mixtapes, Cool Water cologne, red faces drunk on soju. Ho contrasts these freewheeling and at times precarious moments with their home lives, rife with long-held secrets and tensions, as daughters of Taiwanese immigrants. Through shifting perspectives and evocative milieus (from night markets to seedy Korean bars and exclusive clubs), the assemblage comes as close to a primer on modern L.A. Asian American rites of passage as anything in recent memory. -Lisa Wong Macabasco

Jessamine Chan's debut-like all truly terrifying nightmares-starts off in a banal, familiar way: an utterly exhausted mother, in a moment of sleep-deprived despair, does the unthinkable (and yet understandable) and walks out of her apartment, leaving her baby behind. She doesn't intend to be gone for long, but somehow time slips away, and before she realizes it, she's been gone for hours. It's a terrible thing to have done, and she knows it. But no degree of contrition will spare her from the authorities who descend, first removing her child and then transplanting her to an abandoned college campus turned dystopian re-education facility where she will, ostensibly, learn what it truly takes to be a good mother. The tool for her forensically monitored progress is an uncanny robot baby, meant to stimulate her, challenge her, and, crucially, record her every movement, from loving gestures to instants of inattention. The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Schuster) picks up the mantel of writers like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, with their skin-crawling themes of surveillance, control, and technology; but it also stands on its own as a remarkable, propulsive novel. At a moment when state control over women's bodies (and autonomy) seems ever more chilling, the book feels horrifyingly unbelievable and eerily prescient all at once. -Chloe Schama

With a masterful eye for historical detail, Beatrice Hitchman's ambitious new novel plunges us headfirst into the bohemian world of Vienna's early-20th- century golden age, as a sprawling cast of queer characters found themselves drawn into the liberal orbit of the city's Jewish quarter in search of romance, companionship, or simply independence in an otherwise unforgiving world. There are some beautiful love stories woven through the book's many threads, in particular the central relationship between Julia, a wealthy woman who runs away from her husband and affluent lifestyle to be with Eve, a masculine-dressing tailor, and the subsequent tensions that arise over Julia's longing to have a child together. The novel's time leaps-first to the eve of the Second World War, and, in its final chapters, to the city's postwar aftermath-may leave it feeling a little too expansive for some, as various characters fall by the wayside and new ones are introduced, but All of You Every Single One shines as a beautiful, poignant, and deeply felt tale of holding on to the love of the chosen families we create, even in the most adverse of historical circumstances. -Liam Hess

Xochitl Gonzalez's debut novel is a vivacious account of Olga Acevedo's life as a premier party planner to Manhattan's elite-a demanding job that opens with the ordering of luxurious embroidered linen napkins for an exorbitantly priced wedding, some which Olga will pocket to impress her own family. The contiguity of Olga's career life and her familial roots in Puerto Rican Brooklyn creates a tension that ultimately underlines the sacrifices each world constantly asks Olga to upkeep. Gonzalez's story may be that of a woman seeking career success, love, and happiness, but the dynamic story amounts to a slow-burn chronicle of the American Dream, with moments of humor and bare-bones honesty throughout. -Carolina Gonzalez

Nikki May's debut, Wahala (Custom House), will earn her inevitable comparisons to another cosmopolitan foursome narrative (that of Sex and the City), but May's London-set squad has its own distinct set of stories, and as a portrait of a group of Anglo-Nigerian, the novel is focused on a very different demographic than Carrie Bradshaw's New York City set. In fact, the plot is less concerned with an unbreakable clique than with what happens when the primary trio is infiltrated by a glamorous but destabilizing fourth member. ( Wahala translates to "trouble.") The subject of a nine-way bidding war and already slated to become a limited series, Wahala has all the makings of a modern blockbuster. -C.S.

The first half of Kathryn Schulz's new book, Lost and Found (Random House), a sensitive and timely meditation on loss and grief, is balanced by the celebration of love and joy in the second half. But rather than the spoonful-of-sugar structure that this division implies, the book is united-even in its darkest moments-as a lively exploration of some of the strongest emotions we humans have the luck to feel and a wondrous look at how they work in tandem. As Schulz puts it in the book: "What an astonishing thing to find someone. Loss may alter our sense of scale, reminding us that the world is overwhelmingly large while we are incredibly tiny. But finding does the same; the only difference is that it makes us marvel rather than despair." The book grew out of a New Yorker meditation, " Losing Streak," which chronicles the experience of misplacing the mundane and suffering the utmost loss, but it moves far beyond it-into the literary, historical, and philosophical roots of both poles of experience. It offers a sure- and light-footed wander through these heavy topics, though, written with grace and comedy as well as rigor. -C.S.

A chance run-in at an airport between our nameless narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, and an acquaintance from college who has now become an art-world hotshot, Jeff Cook, sets the stage for Antoine Wilson's taut, compulsive chamber piece of a novel, which you'll struggle not to rip through in one sitting. (Thankfully it clocks in at a brisk 192 pages, allowing you to do just that.) After settling in an airport lounge, the enigmatic Jeff begins recounting a wild (and allegedly never-before-shared) tale that begins with him resuscitating a drowning man on a beach and discovering after the fact that the man he saved is a major art dealer. When Jeff pays a visit to his gallery and realizes the man doesn't remember him, he slowly begins ingratiating himself into his life, climbing the ranks of his gallery and eventually even dating his daughter, in a story that carries distinct shades of Patricia Highsmith and Donna Tartt-but to tell any more would spoil the book's thrilling surprises. It may not come with any sweeping messages or moral takeaways (although that ambivalence is surely the point), but Mouth to Mouth is an elegantly told and supremely gripping tale of serendipity and deception-and delivers a brilliant ending that will leave you guessing about everything that came before. -L.H.

Jami Attenberg's 2017 novel, All Grown Up, was a bit of a gateway drug. It felt like it was made for me, in that it reminded me of me: a 30-something Jewish woman looking for love in the big city. I assumed, as often is the case for many fine novels, that this was also Attenberg's story. Her latest book (and first memoir), I Came All This Way to Meet You (Ecco), reveals that the New Orleans-based writer is even more layered and idiosyncratic than her fictional characters. Her newest is an episodic collection of Attenberg's life-her cross-country travels, debilitating injuries, bad plane rides, bad boyfriends-which are all told through her signature intimate and humorous style. But it's her writing on her own work I found particularly revealing. "I became a fiction writer in the first place because stories are a beautiful place to hide," she writes. I Came All This Way details the highs and lows of finding yourself through your work and living a creative life-it's a thrill for superfans and newcomers alike. -Jessie Heyman

The confounding, brilliant, intricate, beautiful, horrific To Paradise is-if this string of adjectives did not sufficiently convey it-an extraordinary book. Divided into three seemingly distinct sections, positioned 100 years apart, the book is one part historical fiction (set in 1893), part present-ish-day chronicle (1993), and part futuristic sci-fi story (2093). (That last chapter, which must have been informed by, if not fully drafted within, the pandemic, presents a dystopian future filled with "cooling suits" required to venture outside and "decontamination chambers" to ward off the ever-present possibility of infection.) Those who consumed Yanagihara's most recent work, A Little Life, will not be surprised that this book, like its predecessor, is interested in pain and suffering more than joy and happiness. But it is also a book full of gloriously painted scenes and tantalizing connection-and despite all its gutting turns, one that maintains an abiding hope for the possibility and power of love. (That may just be the only paradise truly on offer.) In and of themselves, some sections feel in some ways quite conventional, but taken together-with all of their extreme cliffhangers and unanswered questions-the stories seem to be asking: What do we want from a novel? Resolution is not available here, but some of the most poignant feelings that literature can elicit certainly are. -C.S.

The first English translation of a 2002 novel by the celebrated septuagenarian Portuguese author Lídia Jorge, Wind Whistling in the Cranes (Liveright) is set in the aftermath of the 13-year Portuguese Colonial War, telling the story of two families brought together and pulled apart by the vagaries of history: the wealthy Leandro clan, whose factory in a coastal Algarve town becomes home to a family of immigrants from Cape Verde, the Matas. After the Leandro matriarch dies in mysterious circumstances and her granddaughter, the richly drawn protagonist Milena Leandro, becomes increasingly close to the Matases, landlord and tenant begin to turn on each other with devastating consequences. Comparisons have already been drawn to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels-and it's not hard to see why with the book's distinctive blend of social history and the most intimate of family sagas. But Jorge's novel is very much its own thing, with a razor-sharp postcolonial subtext that asks deeper questions about whom we consider the outsider, and why. -L.H.

In her debut novel, The Arc (St. Martin's Press), Tory Henwood Hoen has woven a bracingly entertaining antidote to the hellscape of online dating. Thirty-five-year-old branding wiz Ursula Bryne is in the grip of a third-life crisis, ambivalent about her job and unable to sustain a lasting relationship with anybody other than her cat. That is, until she is tapped to visit the lab of The Arc, a mysterious place that promises lasting love to those lucky enough to spend a week at its unnervingly glossy lab. Ursula is paired with Rafael, an improbably modest and handsome Yale grad blessed with a sense of humor and killer dance moves. The book wears its sci-fi lightly, focusing instead on anatomizing a whirlwind romance that begins to fray around the edges. As the duo's faith in the arc's highly proprietary pairing methodologies begins to falter, they are left to determine if they still buy into each other. Set in a privileged slice of pre-pandemic New York, the story has a sunny feel and a rich supply of semi-satirical backdrops, making pit stops at bro-infested tech conferences and members-only temples to fourth-wave feminism. With its intelligent and unfussy bent, the novel is foremost a plucky city romance that recalls the work of Laurie Colwin. Beneath the dystopian veil lies a thoroughly modern love story with old-fashioned heart. -Lauren Mechling

Imogen Crimp's A Very Nice Girl (Henry Holt) follows Anna, a talented young opera singer who is defying her provincial parents to carve out an artistic life for herself in London. That bohemian existence can prove, at times, a bit trying (she has to share a bed with her roommate and moves into a quasi-feminist commune where tampons are deemed a tool of the patriarchy), and so she takes refuge in the sterile quarters of her finance-professional boyfriend. The book eschews easy "tale of two cities" contrasts, however, and asks some serious if lightly deployed questions about the sacrifices, rewards, and worth of an artistic life (and how you pay for it). With some steamy sex scenes in the mix, Crimp feels like she's channeling something of the Sally Rooney style: interior and complex, but also unafraid to incorporate corporeal forces among all the others that govern us. This is high-class romance at its best. -C.S.

A joy of discovery attends the publication of Johanna Kaplan's Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary (Ecco)-a volume that gathers her cacophonous, mordantly funny stories from the 1960s and '70s (and includes the contents of her prized debut, Other People's Lives). How had I never heard of Kaplan? You'll wonder the same as you get swept up in the world of her slightly neurotic, status-aware postwar Jewish characters who mine humor from dislocation and anxiety. The bravura novella-length "Other People's Lives" is the masterpiece here, a rollicking account of several days in the life of Louise Weil, a piercingly observant, mentally fragile young woman marooned in the ramshackle milieu of a Manhattan artistic couple who take a day trip to the country. It fizzes with the urbane energy of J.D. Salinger, Grace Paley, and Deborah Eisenberg-a restless delight. -Taylor Antrim

The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka, begins at an underground pool in an unnamed city, where regulars find almost-sacred refuge in their favorite lanes and go-to strokes. (Others-like the "binge swimmers" who periodically rush the pool to melt off holiday pounds-are tolerated more than welcomed.) Yet as Otsuka's elegant third novel wends on, its focus narrows to one swimmer in particular: an older woman for whom the water is a stabilizing, comfortingly familiar force. Even as dementia sets in, Alice knows exactly who she is at the pool-that is, until it closes, and she's thrust headlong into the swirling memories, strained relationships, and ever-fracturing sense of self that await her on land. -Marley Marius

Warsan Shire is perhaps best known for having her work featured in Beyoncé Knowles's 2016 feature-length film, Lemonade, but the British-Somali poet is charting a new course with her first full-length poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head (Random House), which weaves together the themes of migration, womanhood, Black identity, and intergenerational collection that Shire is so singularly gifted at exploring. Shire frequently draws on her own life to create her art, and the end result is a collection of poems that will shine as a beacon for marginalized communities everywhere (and, perhaps, inspire those who have always taken their own belonging for granted to think beyond the confines of their individual experience). -E.S.

Chronic illness has been relegated to the margins of public consciousness for far too long, a reality that has only become more painfully stark since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago. Tens of millions of Americans live with chronic, often "invisible" illnesses, and Yale Review editor Meghan O'Rourke's book is a searing and thoroughly researched exploration of the pain and confusion that many of them go through in their quest to have their health issues taken seriously by the medical establishment-and, often, the world at large. -E.S.

Douglas Stuart's new book bears a good deal of resemblance to his debut, Shuggie Bain, which was published quietly just before the pandemic to limited fanfare and then slowly became one of the most lauded novels of the year. (It was my personal favorite.) Young Mungo (Grove), like Shuggie, is told from the perspective of a young boy growing up in a Glasgow tenement with an alcoholic mother and little prospect of escape. But while Shuggie took the claustrophobia of that scenario and expanded it into a broad and treacherous emotional landscape, Young Mungo allows its protagonist to roam a bit wider, making it a more open and ambitious book. If Shuggie took after the great, detail-laden social realist novels of the late 19th century, Young Mungo feel more rooted in the 21st, with alternating settings, shifting time frames, and divergent plots that eventually converge to calamitous effect. Some early descriptions of the book, perhaps desiring to tamp down the inevitable bleakness of its premise, have emphasized a love affair that crosses religious and sectarian lines (and sheds new light on the divisions that plagued not just the more prominently troubled Ireland of the late 20th century but Scotland as well). And there is sporadic love (romantic and familial) to offer warmth and light within the novel's terrifying expanse-but this is a book that sucks you into its darkness and makes you feel its profound, beating heart. -C.S.

In *Little Foxes Took Up Matches-*a notable debut from the writer, editor, and translator Katya Kazbek-a sense of enchantment animates dreary post-Soviet Moscow, where a beautiful boy named Mitya lives in a crowded apartment on a stately old street. As a baby, Mitya swallowed an embroidery needle-or so he and his family believe-and he's certain it made him immortal, like the folktale figure Koschei the Deathless; he discovers another kind of deliverance, and no small amount of danger, dressing up in his mother's clothes, using her makeup, and letting his hair grow long. (He calls this persona Devchonka, or "girl.") A queer coming-of-age narrative in every sense of the words, Kazbek's novel is twisty, tragic, and deeply charming-an endearing exploration of the stories we tell and the people we find in order to live. -M.M.

Jennifer Egan's The Candy House is something of a follow-up to her beloved A Visit From the Goon Squad. Composed of interconnected short pieces (featuring a few of the same characters that populated Goon Squad), The Candy House is also united by the omnipresence of a sci-fi technology that doesn't feel quite so far off from our current reality: a widely available memory download device that allows your consciousness (should you so desire) to live in an openly accessible cloud. The Candy House is a book that goes down deceptively easy. The writing is light and buoyant, the characters quite often a rollicking delight-energized by rock and roll; the countercultures of the '60s and '70s; high-wire acts of espionage; and technological subterfuge. But when you slow down and begin to parse the web that connects it all, the novel takes on increasing gravity. It's a dazzling feat of literary construction that belies the profound questions at its core: Does technology aid our sense of narrative or obscure it? -C.S.

The funny, earthy, and compulsively readable stories in Leigh Newman's debut collection, Nobody Gets Out Alive (Scribner), are about wildness in all its forms. The author's home state of Alaska is vividly rendered in its untamed, frontier beauty-but so too are its denizens, who are fierce Alaskans with questionable taste in home decor and hilariously unrefined personalities. Newman, the author of a 2013 memoir, Still Points North (excerpted in Vogue), which was also set in Alaska, is especially unsentimental on women-on girls kicking free of their fathers (or not); desperate mothers doing the best they can; and, in the prizewinning lead-off story, "Howl Palace," a mordant widow who is not going gracefully into the good Alaskan night. Newman's fiction recalls the flinty humor of Annie Proulx, Ann Patchett, and Antonya Nelson-excellent company to be in. -T.A.

In poet Lisa Hsiao Chen's debut novel, a 30-something Asian American woman cares for her dying father while also investigating the work of enigmatic (real-life) Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh, best known for his rigorously disciplined time-based performances. (For a year at a time, Hsieh was confined to a room with no diversions; punched a timecard every hour; and lived on New York City's streets, avoiding any kind of shelter, including during one of the coldest New York winters on record.) Alternating between the present and 1980s New York, with stops in Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, Chen's novel is a meditation on the passing of time, how we choose to occupy our days, and everyday acts of endurance and survival. -L.W.M.

After the long illness and death of her older sister, Nora, and the long illness and death of her first husband, Jerry, Delia Ephron was stunned-if not entirely surprised-to learn in 2017 that she'd been diagnosed with leukemia. Her engaging, wise, and funny new memoir, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, chronicles her fierce reckoning with cancer, with grief ("I took the sun setting personally," she writes of the loneliness of early widowhood), with the life-affirming power of friendship, and, at age 72, with a new love-Peter, a Jungian psychiatrist who wrote Ephron a friendly email after she published an op-ed in the Times about trying to disconnect Jerry's landline. (Her record of their courtship, conducted initially over email, is as breathlessly romantic as anything she's put into a screenplay-and this is a woman who co-wrote You've Got Mail.) -M.M.

One of the most (posthumously) lauded novelists of recent years, Tove Ditlevsen is known to most as the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, a sprawling three-part memoir that chronicles both her interior life and major events of the 20th century. In this collection, the landscape is more compact, but the insight into human nature is no less poignant: A young girl watches her mother put on a costume, a temporary and tenuous escape threatened by the whims of the father; with calm remove, a woman imagines her married lover's domestic life, a simmering, suppressed anger providing a more forceful undercurrent; a young pregnant couple looking to buy a house confronts the contraction of another family's life at the moment they're expanding theirs. These spare and sparkling stories summon deep wells of emotion without the slightest trace of sentimentality. -C.S.

A young Korean American man reeling from the recent suicide of his girlfriend sets out to learn more about the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death in this powerful novel that delves unflinchingly into the deeply timely question of what it means to belong to more than one culture. Wiley's protagonist's experience of trying to find links between his California upbringing and his adult life in Seoul will resonate with anyone who has ever been asked, "Where are you really from?" -E.S.

If you're coming to this book expecting an extended meditation on the late career of the titular tennis legend, you might be-well, disappointed isn't the word, really: The book is dotted with such thoughts throughout. It's true joy, though, is its buck-wild discursiveness. The entire book is a brooding, a searching, and an investigation-in three parts, each composed of exactly 60 more-or-less brief thoughts, about Dylan, Camus, John Berger, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Redford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Chuck Yeager, T.C. Boyle, Scorsese, J.M.W. Turner, Michelangelo, Boris Becker, Browning, Ruskin, the Battle of Britain, and yes, Roger Federer (that's a wildly incomplete list from just the first 40 pages)-of what it means to come to the end of something: painting, writing, striving, playing, living. If you've read Dyer before, you know what you're in for, and it's in glorious abundance here: humor, memoir, wit, verve, pathos, and an arsenal of erudition. If this is your first immersion, simply be prepared to chase the wind. -Corey Seymour

For those unacquainted with the vocabulary that accompanies the childbearing process, the linea nigra refers to a dark vertical line that can appear to bisect a pregnant person's abdomen. Essayist Jazmina Barrera takes that physical line and writes about and (metaphorically) beyond it, packing her narrative memoir full of carefully considered and exquisitely worded musings on motherhood. Barrera wrote throughout her first pregnancy and into the beginning of her journey as a mother, and the multilayered, deeply felt work that her life experience and obvious talent have combined to produce is eminently worthy of acclaim. -E.S.

Longtime Vogue contributor Marcia DeSanctis recounts a peripatetic life-and the episodes that were less so. DeSanctis had a career as a tour guide, a TV producer (who worked, among other things, on Eastern European stories after the fall of the Berlin Wall), a cosmopolitan writer who marched to "the city's incessant, invigorating drumbeat." And then she moved to the quiet countryside, where she had to come to terms with a sense of herself that wasn't based on constant movement and the frictions of foreign encounters. The essays in this collection (which include a tale of marital infidelity that made a marriage stronger originally published in Vogue) might be framed as travel writing, but they are just as much stories of self-definition that take place here, there, and everywhere. -C.S.

Known for her plucky voice and sweetly amusing ensemble comedies, Emma Straub returns with her most emotionally resonant work yet, This Time Tomorrow. On the night of her 40th birthday, a newly single and slightly intoxicated Alice drops by her father's home, located on an Upper West Side alley that time and foot traffic forgot. She passes out and wakes up in 1996, transported back to a moment when her father was still her energetic 40-something roommate, not an ailing 73-year-old whom she faithfully visits at the hospital. Shuttling between her teenage and middle-aged lives, Alice attempts to engineer a new destiny for her father and experiments with a panoply of what-ifs, one of which lands her the guy that got away. All the while, she grapples with the headstrong and heartbreaking nature of time. Beneath the layers of '90s nostalgia and sci-fi portals to the past lies something even more satisfying: a complicated tale that doesn't feel the slightest bit complicated. -L.M.

From the author of 2015 cult hit Dietland comes a more-than-worthy sophomore effort that follows Sylvia Wren-formerly known as Iris Chapel-the second youngest in a family of six heiress sisters, all seemingly cursed to live (and die) tragically. When Iris becomes Sylvia, she thinks she's escaped her ominous familial fate, but has she? When we meet her in New Mexico in 2017, she's an internationally famous yet reclusive artist ducking the attention of an overzealous journalist determined to track down the story of how Iris became Sylvia. Compelling, no? (Trust us, it is.) -E.S.

Originally published by Topside Press in 2013, Binnie's debut novel-which follows a young, punk-aspiring trans woman who heads west from New York City in her ex-girlfriend's stolen car, attempting to play the fraught role of role model to a younger, not-yet-out acolyte she meets in Nevada-is a beautiful and occasionally disturbing complication of the oh-so-American trope of the cross-country road trip. Detransition, Baby author Torrey Peters is just one of a long list of trans women writers who name Binnie as an influence, and it's long past time for the cis reader to form a bond with the brilliance of her work. -E.S.

It's a complicated thing, the father-daughter relationship, particularly when the two share a profession. So it's fitting that Ada Calhoun's Also a Poet is a complicated, difficult-to-encapsulate book: Labeled a memoir, it's also Calhoun's attempt to finish a biography of the New York School poet Frank O'Hara abandoned by her father, the longtime New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl. The book is composed of unpublished interview transcripts, domestic scenes from her childhood on the Lower East Side (see Calhoun's masterly St. Mark's Is Dead for an expanded disquisition on the site of her youth), and a sweetly personal reckoning with the anxiety of influence. All this sounds like a pretty heady brew, but Calhoun's voice is clear and cogent, a winning and personable guide. -C.S.

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One of the best parts of working at a magazine? The piles of books that arrive months before the rest of the world gets to see them. The year may only be a few months old, but we have been reading far beyond to give you a taste of the best books so far and to come.

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BBC's Top 100 Books You Need to Read Before You Die

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The BBC has an esteemed list of 100 books they think every person should read before they die -- a literary bucket list, if you will.

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transcript

Margaret Atwood on Stories, Deception and the Bible

The acclaimed author explains how stories shape our worlds - by telling me many stories.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

I'm Ezra Klein, and this is "The Ezra Klein Show."

Oh, I'm excited about this one. So Margaret Atwood, the legend, has written - it seems like this can't be true, but it is. She's written at least 70 novels, 20 books of poetry, eight collections of short fiction, and then countless essays, a bunch of which are bound together in her new collection, "Burning Questions." And of course, her 1985 book, "The Handmaid's Tale," has never stopped being remade and reinterpreted and debated. There was just a huge prestige television version of it a couple of years ago.

Why? What makes Margaret Atwood so productive, but also, what makes her work so endlessly relevant? And this episode, in a way, is a meta example of the thing it's talking about. We recorded this conversation in mid-February. We recorded it before Russia invaded Ukraine. And yet, you wouldn't quite know that, listening. We ended up talking about life behind the Iron Curtain. We talked about how "The Handmaid's Tale" was animated by Atwood's observations, about how communication and information worked inside totalitarian regimes.

We talked about the role that history and the stories we tell about the past play in our lives, the way leaders use those stories and control over those stories to control us. We talked about the allure that authoritarian figures and tales have for people. This honestly shouldn't fit as well into our recent run of shows, as it does, but here we are. And that's par for the course with Atwood. Her work is shot through with this eerie prescience, which is part of why it keeps proving so long-lived.

A very good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, that's what the rest of us are going to be worrying about a decade from now or more. And that's one question motivating our conversation. How does she choose what to worry about? But we talk about a lot more than that, too. We talk about the Bible, about the way climate change will reshape not just our world, but our relationships.

We talk about the way cultures are shaped by the dominant energy sources of the time. We talk about U.F.O.s. She even sings a song. This one, it was such a joy to record, such a joy to get to have this conversation. I hope you get as much from it as I did. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Margaret Atwood, welcome to the show.

margaret atwood

Happy to be here.

ezra klein

So let's begin with this - why do human beings think in stories?

margaret atwood

ezra klein

What do you think the disadvantage is of being a species that thinks in stories, where information is more persuasive in a good story?

margaret atwood

ezra klein

What makes the story believable?

margaret atwood

Oh, well, now, let me see what kind of thing you might like. I think you might like a story about what a good person you are. You're a good person, Ezra. Do you want to do the right thing? Sure you do, I can tell. Well, you can really help out humankind. So all you have to do is sacrifice 17 children at the full of the moon, and you're going to do that, aren't you, Ezra? Because you're a good person and you want to help.

I think most people want to be good. And they want to help. I don't take a really cynical view of human nature that way. I think we do want to be good. We do want to help. And so a really conniving person will pitch to that side of us, rather than saying just, let's rob a bank and make a million dollars. You know, I think you would say no to the bank robbery, Ezra, because it's not helpful. You might say yes to it if we said, let's rob a bank and use the million dollars to help humankind and advance equality. You might do that. Yeah?

ezra klein

I mean, I worry my bank heist skills are weak, so I might have practical objections to the plan.

margaret atwood

Supposing it was a foolproof plan, you might do it then, but only if it were for the greater good. So I think we're more likely to be sucked into doing stuff by people manipulating our good side than by people appealing to our greed and power hungriness, although there are enough of us who are interested in the greed and power hungriness. So it's a motif.

ezra klein

I buy the thought that our good side is more potent to manipulate than other parts of us. But the other thing I think you're getting at there that always feels true to me is that part of the power of a story is the degree to which it makes us a person simply of consequence, that we see ourselves as the actor living at a moment in human history where we matter. We're not just one of the many.

margaret atwood

Well, stories, by their very nature, have central characters, unless they're history stories dealing just with statistics, but we know that we're much more likely to be able to remember a story that is about a person or people, not one that is just about numbers, unless we make the numbers themselves into actors in the story. I'm going to tell you a story about the number nine, a very heroic number.

ezra klein

I watch a lot of "Sesame Street" these days.

margaret atwood

I bet.

ezra klein

I can relate.

margaret atwood

Yeah, so you make the numbers into sort of entities and then we can be interested in them. But if they're just numbers, not so much. We didn't develop math until pretty late in our human history, whereas we developed language and music very, very early. So stories come naturally to small kids. You know this yourself. So this happens, then this happens and then this happens. They understand that there's a plot, and that there are actors in the plot, like their teddy bear. So it's really built in.

And I think what kids do before the age of two is pretty indicative of what comes with the toolkit. They already are doing little dances. They have a sense of rhythm. They're very interested in music. And they're very interested in words and facial expressions. But they're not interested in nine times nine at that age, if ever.

ezra klein

To my father's enduring disappointment - he's a mathematician, and I was never that interested in nine times nine.

margaret atwood

Yeah.

ezra klein

One thing I noticed reading your book of essays is that there are certain stories or groups of stories that you circle. And you come back and back, particularly, to the stories of the Bible. How do you think about or how do you explain from a secular perspective, because, obviously, that's another explanation from the spiritual perspective. But how do you explain the potency, the stickiness of the stories in the Bible? Because they're not easily accessed, and many of them are not easy.

margaret atwood

I mean, there's a lot of sex, death, blood and violence in there, which is one of the reasons it's remained such a popular book. These are dramatic stories. When you get into the begets and the begots, maybe not so much. But what we would call the key stories are very dramatic. And they often feature something that we really like, which is underdogs making good. So a number of the key stories are like that. And some of them are about really cataclysmic events. And some of them that we didn't get in high school are about very bad behavior.

So the one that I put into "The Testaments," which is the concubine cut into 12 pieces, for some reason they didn't parade that in front of the eight-year-olds. I don't know why. So what's a concubine, mom? One kid writing a Sunday school essay said, King Solomon had 12 wives and 82 porcupines. We just didn't know. So, yeah, it's very interesting to see what kind of bad behavior is actually condoned and permitted, but there isn't a lot of papering over in the Bible. If people are bad, they're bad. Like, it's right out there on the page. And even people who are favored quite frequently behave badly and get called on it.

ezra klein

I want to talk a bit about the way that stories function in politics. You're Canadian, but you've spent a fair amount of time living in the United States as well. What's your view of the difference between the stories Americans tell about themselves, about their country, and the stories that Canadians tell about their country?

margaret atwood

ezra klein

I do not.

margaret atwood

No?

ezra klein

Before my time.

margaret atwood

(SINGING) Oh, they don't have God behind the Iron Curtain. To Satan they have given - something - crown.

archived recording

(SINGING) But this evil nation will never find salvation. Tell the Lord there's the Iron Curtain down.

ezra klein

It's catchy.

margaret atwood

Catchy, you know? So the story about America was, that's where you wanted to be. That's where you didn't have all the things that were going on behind the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain then comes down in 1989. That story loses some of its grip. So if you're going to be land of virtuous light, who is the foil to that? You know, who gets to play the penguin to your Batman? Or even worse, the Joker to your Batman? And that was a problem. I remember the '90s, which is probably when you were born.

ezra klein

I'm a little older than that.

margaret atwood

ezra klein

I think you're right about America groping for another foil in the long, kind of post-Cold War period. One story I sometimes tell myself about where we are is that there is an attempt to make it the Islamic world. That didn't hold together. It wasn't big enough. It was too Al-Qaeda. We're too dependent on Saudi Arabia. So we found it here. I don't really think it's going to be Putin. I don't even really think it's going to be China. It's each other.

margaret atwood

ezra klein

Mm-hmm.

margaret atwood

So that's what you're seeing. It's an arm wrestle for the soul of America.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

You've talked a bit about beginning to compose "The Handmaid's Tale" in West Berlin in 1984, so the year I was born, actually, and before the wall fell. So how did being there then influence the way you thought about the book?

margaret atwood

I had actually started making notes on it in 1991, but it took me a while to actually work up to writing it because it was so - it was somewhat nutty, or such was the ambience at the time. So there I was in West Berlin. And because we weren't German, we could go to East Berlin more easily than Germans could. And we could also go to Czechoslovakia, which we did, and we went to Poland. So we had experiences of three Iron Curtain countries at the time, and they were somewhat different.

The East Germans, I think, were sewed up the tightest of anybody. And we now know from the Stasi files that, indeed, there were a lot of informants and people were pretty careful about what they would say. In Czechoslovakia, we could talk to people but only in open spaces. So you couldn't have a frank conversation in a building or a car because people just assumed it was bugged. In Poland, it was already pretty wide open in 1984.

So Poland has had lots of experiences of people marching across them and occupying them. Some of those experiences for them were pretty recent. The general populace was not paying a lot of attention to what the rules were. So taxi driver drove up, and he said, dollars? And we said, zlotys? And he drove away. Once that starts happening, once you start preferring somebody else's currency, you know that the government is losing some authority.

Anyway, very interesting to be there at that time. And I think some of the stuff that's been going on recently is that the people doing those stuff are too young to remember any of that. They don't know what a real totalitarianism is like. And they're not paying attention to the kinds of steps that lead to it, how you get one of these things going, how you get buy-in, what sort of propaganda is likely to be put out there to begin with.

And you never begin by saying, I'm going to be a tyrannist dictator, and I'm going to ruin your life. You don't start out that way. You start out by saying, I'm going to make things so much better. And you want that to happen, don't you, Ezra, because you're a good person. But first, we have to get rid of those people because they're not good people.

ezra klein

That makes me think of something I noticed when reading "The Handmaid's Tale," which is how much of the book is occupied with how one communicates when they can't speak freely. And you get it in this very embodied way. Literally, how would you do it? Where would you meet? What words would you use? How would you hold your body in those moments? It's very visceral.

margaret atwood

Oh, well, this was one of the things from East Berlin. And after I'd written "The Handmaid's Tale," it got made into a movie. And we launched that movie in Berlin, just as the wall was coming down. And we launched it twice. We launched it in West Berlin. And the after-party was talking about the acting, talking about the set design, talking about the usual things you talk about in movies when there aren't any other considerations. You're talking about how good a movie is it, are you not?

And then we went across to East Berlin, and we launched it there and it was packed. People watched it very intently and threw bouquets up on the stage afterwards and said, this was our life. And they didn't mean the outfits. They meant you couldn't talk to anybody because you didn't know if they were spying on you. So it was that sort of eerie feeling of, that things look normal, but who is really actually who?

Prague was similar, similarly, rather, shut down. And similarly, you didn't know just who was listening in. But when we got checked into our room in the hotel, the bellman pointed to the chandelier and put his finger to his lips. In other words, that's bugged. Whenever we wanted anything in the hotel room, we would just stand under the chandelier and say, I wonder why they haven't changed that light bulb. And knock, knock, knock, there would be the light bulb. But after telling us about that, he then took us into the vestibule and said, want to change some dollars?

Anyway, everything was sort of underneath. So we went in search of Kafka at that time in Prague, trying to find Kafka, because I'm a big fan of Kafka, and couldn't find any Kafka things. Graham actually went to his addresses, trying to find Kafka. Knock on the door, Kafka. No, no, no, no, no Kafka. No, goodbye. Slam. So, very verboten, Kafka, at that time.

We then went back in '89, and already, there were Kafka handkerchiefs, Kafka playing cards. Kafka tchotchkes were already beginning to appear. And then I went back a little bit later, and it was full-blown Kafka. Oh, you sort of couldn't avoid Kafka. There was a statue. There's an award. I've got the award. I got the Kafka award. I was thrilled. And in the hotel where I was staying, they had a whole sort of display of sort of Kafka's pencil, Kafka's typewriter, Kafka's chewing gum. You know, just anything that they could collect was in there.

So this is a story about two things, number one, about how some literary figures get repressed under certain kinds of regimes. Why Kafka? Because he wrote stories about impenetrable bureaucracies, the justice of which could not be figured out. And that was a bit too close to the bone, I suppose. And the other part of the story is how something can disappear but then reappear, how you can be a villain for one regime and a hero for the next. And that can work both ways.

ezra klein

Tell me a bit about the regime you construct in "The Handmaid's Tale." What does Gilead believe?

margaret atwood

OK, so the answer to that question is, what questions was I attempting to answer? And remember when I start writing it, the beginning of the '80s, when there's already a backlash against a lot of the stuff that had been happening in the '60s and '70s. And things do tend to go that way. So you have 10 or 15 years of a certain period, and then you have a push-back against it by people who didn't like it when it was happening.

So Joan Didion predicted it. She said some of these people are not happy. This is not their idea of how things should go. And that also can work both ways because any group of over 200 people is almost bound to have a schism.

ezra klein

It's a good rule.

margaret atwood

ezra klein

Certainly not, but it always struck me that to our earlier conversation about the Bible, I think there's a wisdom in suggesting that the way a totalitarian regime like that could emerge, is it connects itself to the core stories of a society.

margaret atwood

Absolutely. And not only that, if you make it into a religion, which, of course, so many regimes throughout history have done - the divine right of kings, the Holy Roman Empire - if you connect it with the religion, then it becomes heresy to oppose it. It becomes a very powerful tool. You're not just against some prime minister or other. You're against God. And that's a pretty serious thing in a believing community. And a lot of rulers have told a story about how they are there by divine fiat. In fact, you find it on the English money to this day.

ezra klein

When I was looking at "The Handmaid's Tale" this week, I was really struck by its modernity. Even offhand lines just felt very specific to the moment. And three of them really stuck with me, and I wanted to talk with you about them. One was this - you write, "We lived as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance. You have to work at it."

margaret atwood

ezra klein

I've read enough interviews with you to know you kind of bat away questions of prescience, but it struck me reading that that it's actually maybe one of the simple answers to why a number of your books have an extraordinary staying power and feel like they were a bit ahead of their time, which is simply that you seem pretty good at not ignoring, that, simply, you're asking, well, what if this is true? What if this continues? What if what I see is real?

margaret atwood

Yes, I wouldn't call it a gift.

ezra klein

None of them are, right? Isn't that the thing about the gifts in stories, at least?

margaret atwood

Well, gifts from the gods usually have a catch. Somebody asked me the other day, would you like to live forever? And I said, well, I've heard that story. Don't ask for eternal life unless you also ask for eternal youth, because it's not going to work out well. They have to be treated with care, gifts from the gods. So there are certain areas where I pay quite a lot of attention, but other areas where I probably just don't. Like everybody else, there are certain things that I just - I don't know much about them. I don't know what goes on. Therefore, they're not my focus.

ezra klein

There's another line that struck me as particularly potent in the book, which is this one. You write, quote, "How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?" And you're talking about the before world, in a way, our world now, the consumer world. But it just struck me as such a clear way of putting something of the human condition, not just insatiability, but a talent for insatiability. Tell me about that.

margaret atwood

ezra klein

I have a lot of plastic pails in my home right now.

margaret atwood

Yeah, and no metal pails, right?

ezra klein

None.

margaret atwood

Plastic pails are cheap. So cheap stuff, and therefore, you had to have to keep all the wheels turning. You had to have people wanting to buy stuff. And you got the throwaway economy, and you get a lot of plastic. And that's the big problem that we're dealing with now, or one of the big problems. Where is it all going? Well, it's going into your bloodstream ultimately. Going into the ocean, it's going into the water, it's going into the food, a lot of micro-plastic.

ezra klein

One thing I like about that answer is that I think when I read that line myself, I thought about the talent for insatiability as a human condition, the inability to be happy, to always want a bit more. But something you're saying, which is, of course, true, is that even if human beings have, at many times, been itchy, even if just sitting still can be hard, the kind of insatiability we have now is culturally different even in memory.

margaret atwood

Oh, yeah, I think so. That's large yes, just completely. Think of all the food that is thrown away every day on the North American continent. That would never, ever, ever have happened in times of scarcity. You would not do that.

ezra klein

And I guess the other line I wanted to bring to you here because it maybe relates well to that one, this comes in context of two characters, again, thinking back to before times and obsessing over the difficulties of their extramarital affair, but I just loved it, which is, we thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

margaret atwood

Exactly. They are looking into happiness these days. They're looking into neurological happiness. And they're looking into social happiness. One thing that they're thinking these days is that happiness and unhappiness are very tied to your perception of what other people have. And in a material world in which you're valued according to the stuff you've got, being poor isn't just being poor. Being poor is being undervalued and treated as negligible. The more equal people are, from the point of view of what they've got, the happier they are likely to be. So it's not a question of what you've got. It's a question of whether what you've got is considered negligible or whether what you've got is considered exceptional.

ezra klein

We all feel a version of this, and it's very hard to live as if it's true, even if you intellectually do, that the problems I have right now are wonderful problems to have. Does it mean, on some level, they're not problems? I mean, my son was up every hour on the hour overnight. And whatever, I have all the little difficulties of life, but it is hard to imagine how I will look at myself and my own lack of not spoken, but felt gratitude at times. But it's hard to live as if you know how good your life truly is. It's just a strange thing about being human.

margaret atwood

ezra klein

Yes. It would not be great. I think there's something to being grateful there.

margaret atwood

Oh, I'm so glad you're here, having dinner with us. When are they leaving?

ezra klein

I think it's easily enough to conceive how, in '84, you're looking at totalitarianism, at East Germany and also thinking about trends in America, but something in the background is that you get Gilead in part because of environmental crisis.

margaret atwood

Yeah.

ezra klein

So tell me, to you, how you think about societies changing as their ecosystems degrade, their environmental ecosystems.

margaret atwood

Things are going to get nastier. We can afford to be neighborly and tolerant when there's basically enough to go around. When that starts diminishing, then people get angry and defensive. So if you go to Ireland, there was a time when people start building defensive towers. And that can be keyed pretty closely to a climate change that took place then. Things got wetter.

And when things got wetter, you knew that the food supply was going to be diminishing. And people were going to be becoming more territorial and trying to protect that in which they had. That is one theory. So, yeah, if you have enough for three squares a day, are you going to go out and steal food, yourself? I'm just asking you, Ezra.

ezra klein

Probably not.

margaret atwood

No, probably not, because you don't need it. You don't need to take the risk for that. But when you're starving, it's a different story. So, sure, as I said, one of the effects of the climate crisis is going to be diminishing harvests. And another effect is going to be the moving around of invasive species and destructive plant diseases.

ezra klein

I spend a lot of time over the past year looking at literature on how heat changes the individual and country level propensity for violence. And the short answer is, it goes up. But I don't think people realize how strong that relationship is. You can even find it in literature. Part of "Romeo and Juliet" takes place on a very hot day, and they know they shouldn't go out because they're going to go get into a fight in that kind of heat, but they do it anyway.

But there are all these amazing individual experiments, too. There's this one sadistic experiment I love where it was in Phoenix, Arizona. And the researchers would get in their car, and they would get to a light. And when it turned green, they just wouldn't move. And then they would time how long it took the drivers behind them to honk. And the hotter the day, the more the people behind them would honk. The angrier they would get, and they would get angry more quickly.

margaret atwood

Oh, boy.

ezra klein

But then you can also find this at the macro level. There's a relationship between hotter weather and civil conflict. And I've often wondered if climate change will kill more people through the wars it indirectly makes likelier than directly through the hurricanes and fires it starts.

margaret atwood

I think there's no doubt about that. When the French Revolution started, it was very hot.

ezra klein

I was like, no, I don't. I didn't know that.

margaret atwood

So the French monarchy had put a lot of money into the American Revolution because they were pissed at the British for having taken New France. They want to get back at them, so they overspent on the American Revolution. And then they upped the taxes, never popular. And then the price of bread went up. So perfect storm. People were angry enough to take the risk.

ezra klein

This all gets to something people sometimes call climate authoritarianism, the idea that climate crisis will change systems not towards cooperation, but towards authoritarianism, towards closing borders.

margaret atwood

Control, yep.

ezra klein

You see some of it maybe even here. The follow-up book to "The Handmaid's Tale," "The Testaments," is very much about how different people react to authoritarian incursions. So I'm curious what you've come to believe or learned about that. What makes people more open to authoritarianism? What makes them not just societally, but individually less open to it?

margaret atwood

ezra klein

It's also the reverse question is so interesting, too. How does going along not violate your sense of self? A couple of years ago, I read this book called "They Thought They Were Free." And it's just about ordinary Germans who joined the Nazi Party. One book can only tell you so much, but what really struck me from it is just the role of very petty resentments. You don't think too much about the global picture. And you're just pissed at those condescending or richer than you people over there.

And it's bit by bit. And your idea of yourself is in relationship to the people you think have already wronged you, or the ways in which you feel your life has been unfair. And I mean, where it all ends up going, of course, was Nazi Germany - and I'm Jewish - is, it is what it is. But what is so chilling about that book was how many political movements, the incentives of these just ordinary members of the party could describe.

margaret atwood

ezra klein

Mm-hmm, it's an amazing book.

margaret atwood

The adrenaline, you know, the exhilaration, the feeling that I haven't had this much fun since, like, forever. I'm just having - I feel so alive, hitting people in the nose, et cetera. And people describe the sort of battle energy that comes over them. And there is a real adrenaline rush that happens. And we can't leave that out. You cannot leave that out.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

You've written, over the years, a lot of very vivid dystopias. Why not utopias?

margaret atwood

Well, now. Now we're getting into it. Now we're getting into the problem, OK. 19th century was a century of utopias. So many of them were written that Gilbert and Sullivan write an opera called "Utopia Limited," which is a satire on it. But you only satirize something that's a thing, you know, that's become a vogue. Why did they write so many utopias? Because they'd already made so many amazing discoveries that had changed things.

So germs, who knew about them? We know about them now. And look what we can do now that we know about germs. Maybe now we'll wash our hands before delivering babies and giving everybody puerperal fever the way we had been doing before. Steam engines, wow, this is amazing. Steam machinery and factories, look at that. Sewing machines, wow. Oh, and before that was all hand sewing. And what might be coming? Jules Verne writing about submarines on the way, air travel, "Around the World in 80 Days." So it was just going to get better.

There were some problems like the woman problem, but the utopias usually solved those by giving the women a better deal and less clothing and all different kinds. And they solved overpopulation various ways. One of them was the future people just wouldn't be interested in sex. So I read a lot of those when I was a Victorianist, and then people start writing them in the 20th century. Why? Because too many of them were tried in real life on a grand scale.

So Soviet Union comes in as a utopia. Hitler's Germany comes in as a utopia, though only for certain people. Soviet Union tried to be more inclusive. But first, you had to kill those people like the Cossacks and Kulaks and what have you. But then you could have the utopia. And Mao's China comes in as a utopia, and lots of others. And then it's not great. So instead, we get "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin. We get "1984." We get "Fahrenheit 451." It's not great, and it becomes very difficult to write a utopia because nobody believes in it anymore. And they'd seen the results.

But I think we're getting back to if not let's have utopia, but first we have to kill all those people, I think we're getting to the point where we're saying, unless we improve the way we're living, unless we change the way we're living, goodbye, homo sapiens sapiens. You cannot continue on a planet as a mid-sized, land-based, oxygen-breathing mammal if there isn't enough oxygen, which is what will happen if we kill the oceans and cut down all the trees.

So we are looking into the barrel of a gun as a species. And the big debate now is, OK, how much, how soon can it be done? And will people even go for it? And meanwhile, you've got all of these other problems that the problem you're trying to solve is causing. So cascading series of events - can it be reversed? So, some of the thinking is being directed towards, yes, it can, because unless you do, yes, it can, you're going to do, no, it can't. And if it's, no, it can't, goodbye, us.

So I am working with a platform called Disco to do an online practical utopias course in which people will, like LEGO, like Minecraft, basically, they will examine the components of our material way of living, like what house, what food, what clothing, what energy - can we turn it around on the material level? And in order to do that, what will our social organization have to be like? So what form of government do you propose for this utopia that you're going to build?

So we'll provide them with the tools that are now already available, different ways of building houses, different ways of making fabrics, different ways of providing clothing, et cetera, different energy forms. Let's see what you can put together out of that, and who's going to run this thing. So some very fundamental questions.

ezra klein

Have you ever constructed a utopia even just for yourself that you find convincing?

margaret atwood

Not yet. I know there are pitfalls, having read so many of them. You'll notice that I put one into "Oryx and Crake" in "The MaddAddam Trilogy." And that's an engineered species that lacks our drawback, shall we say. But they're also, for a human being, like us, very boring.

ezra klein

And it also seemed to be there, before we got into the planning for how it might be different, that the principle you were at least implying is that we're likelier to better society trying to avoid dystopias than create utopias. Maybe utopias create too much potential for moral blackmail or something.

margaret atwood

They're joined at the hip. And let us say also that one person's utopia is another person's dystopia, which is a theme you often find in the writing of utopia, dystopias. The other thing goes back to your initial queries about stories. What happens to stories once you have utopia? What are we going to tell stories about? Because surely, there's no conflict anymore. We've eliminated that.

ezra klein

I figure what stories do in utopias is realize there's no such thing as utopia.

margaret atwood

It's a problem. So the utopia in which everybody absolutely lives happily ever after forever and ever is very unlikely because we are who we are. So what people did in certain kinds of communist societies was it was fine to tell stories about how awful things were before communism. That was great. You could do that. So certain kinds of stories become more possible than others. So in the middle of a totalitarian dictatorship, you don't want to be telling stories about how awful totalitarian dictatorships are because, off with your head.

ezra klein

One reason I ask this is that something that I worry about sometimes is that what the right has for its side is an inspiring vision of the past, and the left has lost an inspiring vision of the future. And I know some, I should say, I know there are sci-fi writers working with utopias now. I know Becky Chambers just wrote a book, which I just read actually, on that theme. But I think there's something to that, nevertheless, like the - sometimes I worry that the left has become about preventing disaster, but doesn't quite have a vision of what it is trying to create.

margaret atwood

Yeah, they're going to have to do preventing disaster plus improving people's lives. Plus, it'll be fun.

ezra klein

Plus, it'll be fun is, I think, an often missed piece.

margaret atwood

Well, there is a puritanical self-flagellation streak on the left, as it is currently constituted that if it's fun, it can't be good. They miss a point. If it's not fun on some level, people aren't going to do it. So is it about how virtuous you are, or is it about actually trying to better conditions? So if it's only about how virtuous you are, then you're probably an antinomian Puritan. And if it's actually about trying to improve conditions, you might be a William Morris socialist.

So William Morris thought that not only could you improve conditions, but you could make them more fun and more beautiful. Whereas a lot of Puritanical antinomians think that beauty is beside the point. It's actually not.

ezra klein

One of the questions I always wondered about for myself, as somebody who works in news in a particular period of human history, is, what are the things that when this era is looked back on, the question would be, why did people not take that more seriously? And I'll ask a sort of fun version of this, but then I want to ask a general version of this, which is, what was your view of the spate of U.F.O. news coming out of particularly the U.S. government over the last year that got a ton of attention, then everybody just sort of moved on after a report came out saying, we didn't know what to make of any of this?

margaret atwood

Well, I think that report says it all. We don't know what to make of any of this. And um, if you then don't have more of the story, of course, it's going to move on because if the story is, we don't know, there's not much to end to that. We don't know. Oh, and now it's Tuesday, and we still don't know. And Thursday, we also don't know on Thursday. So it isn't a story if it ends with, we don't know, and there's nothing else to add. It's, again, the nature of the stories. If there is no next chapter, what can you say? We still don't know.

ezra klein

Perhaps that's the disadvantage of being a creature that thinks in stories.

margaret atwood

There are many disadvantages, but there are many advantages. And if there weren't many advantages, we wouldn't be doing it.

ezra klein

What do you think are the stories that are obviously there that will be things that shape our coming decades and that we're not paying attention to? And I want to put out here things that maybe we're not doing enough on, like climate crisis, but we are paying more attention to authoritarianism. What are the things that really don't get discussed, even though they seem to you like they are fundamental?

margaret atwood

Oh, how about mushrooms? Let's talk about mushrooms. That's a really good story. I love the mushroom story. So Merlin Sheldrake is probably the person you want to be talking to. And we are now learning how to make all kinds of things out of mushrooms that we weren't even thinking about a little while ago.

So you can get a mushroom coffin. And you can make building blocks out of mushrooms. You can make fabric out of mushrooms. And this is even apart from any food and medical uses that they may have. So I'd say keep your eye on the mushrooms. They may be entering your life sooner than you think.

ezra klein

I like that answer quite a bit. We always end the show on book recommendations. And because you've also done a wonderful number of children's books and even graphic novels, I'm going to ask it to you a little bit different. What are -

margaret atwood

Don't do this to me.

ezra klein

What are two books you'd recommend to the audience for adults, and what are two children's books you'd recommend?

margaret atwood

ezra klein

Yeah, that often seems to be a secret of highly solidarity oriented societies.

margaret atwood

It doesn't always work. So Scotland wasn't huge, but they're always having battles.

ezra klein

That's true, too. How about children's books? Are there two children's books that you've just loved over the years?

margaret atwood

Am I allowed to say "Charlotte's Web"?

ezra klein

Absolutely.

margaret atwood

OK, I'm saying "Charlotte's Web," about a spider who saves the life of a pig doomed for slaughter, interestingly enough, through words. So the spider manages to tell a story about the pig that makes him exceptional. It's a good use of words. So that. Dare we delve into "Lord of the Rings" - is that a children's book?

ezra klein

It is if you say it is.

margaret atwood

ezra klein

Margaret Atwood, your new book is "Burning Questions." What a pleasure. Thank you so much.

margaret atwood

Been a pleasure to talk to you, and good luck with everything that you're doing and also with the rest of your life.

ezra klein

The acclaimed author explains how stories shape our worlds - by telling me many stories.

A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now is likely what the rest of us will be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women's social progress. The seductions and dangers of genetic engineering. Climate change leading to social unrest. Advertising culture permeating more and more of our lives. Atwood - the author of the Booker Prize-winning novels " The Blind Assassin" and " The Testaments," as well as " The Handmaid's Tale," " Oryx and Crake" and, most recently, the essay collection " Burning Questions " - was writing about these topics decades ago, forecasting the unsettling world that we inhabit now. Pick up any one of her 17 published novels, and you will likely come across a theme or a quality of the setting that rings eerily true in the present day.

This is especially true of Atwood's magnum opus, "The Handmaid's Tale," which takes place in a future America where climate change, droughts, a decaying economy and falling birthrates lead to the rise of a theocracy in which women called Handmaids are conscripted into childbirth. The repressive regime she created in that novel, Gilead, has been endlessly referred to and reinterpreted over the years because of the wisdom it contains about why people cooperate with - and resist - political movements that destroy the freedom of others. And as recent weeks have shown, we're far from the day when that wisdom becomes irrelevant to present circumstances.
[You can listen to this episode of "The Ezra Klein Show" on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]
We discuss the deep human craving for stories, why Atwood believes we are engaged in "an arm wrestle for the soul of America," what makes the stories of the Bible so compelling, the dangerous allure of totalitarian movements, how the shift from coal to oil helped to fuel the rise of modern consumerism, why she thinks climate change will cause even more harm by increasing the likelihood of war than it will by increasing the likelihood of extreme weather, how our society lost its capacity to imagine new utopias, why progressives need to incorporate more fun into their politics, why we should "keep our eye on the mushroom," Atwood's take on recent U.F.O. sightings and more. She even sings a bit of a song from the 1950s about the Iron Curtain.

Disclaimer: This episode contains explicit language.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following "The Ezra Klein Show" on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)

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Credit... Courtesy of Luis Mora

"The Ezra Klein Show" is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski, Coral Ann Howells and Brooks Bouson.

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Opinion | Margaret Atwood on Stories, Deception and the Bible

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transcript The acclaimed author explains how stories shape our worlds - by telling me many stories. [MUSIC PLAYING] ezra klein I'm Ezra Klein, and this is "The Ezra Klein Show." Oh, I'm excited about this one. So Margaret Atwood, the legend, has written - it seems like this can't be true, but it is.

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Friends, it's true: the end of the decade approaches. It's been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it's been populated by some damn fine literature. We'll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website-though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task-in the coming weeks, we'll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, the best memoirs of the decade, and the best essay collections of the decade. But our sixth list was a little harder-we were looking at what we (perhaps foolishly) deemed "general" nonfiction: all the nonfiction excepting memoirs and essays (these being covered in their own lists) published in English between 2010 and 2019.

Reader, we cheated. We picked a top 20. It only made sense, with such a large field. And 20 isn't even enough, really. But so it goes, in the world of lists.

The following books were finally chosen after much debate (and multiple meetings) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you'll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten-so we've also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we've missed in the comments below.

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I read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow when it first came out, and I remember its colossal impact so clearly-not just on the academic world (it is, technically, an academic book, and Alexander is an academic) but everywhere. It was published during the Obama Administration, an interval which many (white people) thought signaled a new dawn of race relations in America-of a kind of fantastic post-racialism. Though it's hard to look back on this particular zeitgeist now (when, and I still can't believe I'm writing this, Donald Trump is president of the United States) without decrying the ignorance and naiveté of this mindset, Alexander's book called out this the insistence on a phenomenon of "colorblindness" in 2012, as a veneer, as a sham, or as, simply, another form of ignorance. "We have not ended racial caste in America," she declares, "we have merely redesigned it." Alexander's meticulous research concerns the mass incarceration of black men principally through the War on Drugs, Alexander explains how the United States government itself (the justice system) carries out a significant racist pattern of injustice-which not only literally subordinates black men by jailing them, but also then removes them of their rights and turns them into second class citizens after the fact. Former convicts, she learns through working with the ACLU, will face discrimination (discrimination that is supported and justified by society) which includes restrictions from voting rights, juries, food stamps, public housing, student loans-and job opportunities. "Unlike in Jim Crow days, there were no 'Whites Only' signs." Alexander explains. "This system is out of sight, out of mind." Her book, which exposes this subtler but still horrible new mode of social control, is an essential, groundbreaking achievement which does more than call out the hypocrisy of our infrastructure, but provide it with obvious steps to change. -Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

In this riveting (despite its near 600 pages) and highly influential book, Mukherjee traces the known history of our most feared ailment, from its earliest appearances over five thousand years ago to the wars still being waged by contemporary doctors, and all the confusion, success stories, and failures in between-hence the subtitle "a biography of cancer," though of course it is also a biography of humanity and of human ingenuity (and lack thereof).

Mukherjee began to write the book after a striking interaction with a patient who had stomach cancer, he told The New York Times. "She said, 'I'm willing to go on fighting, but I need to know what it is that I'm battling.' It was an embarrassing moment. I couldn't answer her, and I couldn't point her to a book that would. Answering her question-that was the urgency that drove me, really. The book was written because it wasn't there."

His work was certainly appreciated. The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer in General Nonfiction (the jury called it "An elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science."), the Guardian first book award, and the inaugural PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; it was a New York Times bestseller. But most importantly, it was the first book many laypeople (read: not scientists, doctors, or those whose lives had already been acutely affected by cancer) had read about the most dreaded of all diseases, and though the science marches on, it is still widely read and referenced today. -Emily Temple, Senior Editor

As a strongly humanities-focused person, it's difficult for me to connect with books about science. What can I say besides that public education and I failed each other. When I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I found myself thinking that if all scientific knowledge were part of this kind of incredibly compelling and human narrative, I would probably be a doctor by now. (I mean, it's possible.) Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and her cells (dubbed HeLa cells) which were cultured without her permission, and which were the first human cells to reproduce in a lab-making them immensely valuable to scientists in research labs all over the world. HeLa cells have been used for the development of vaccines and treatments as well as in drug treatments, gene mapping, and many, many other scientific pursuits. They were even sent to space so scientists could study the effects of zero gravity on human cells.

Skloot set a wildly ambitious project for herself with this book. Not only does she write about the (immortal) life of the cells as well as the lives of Lacks and her (human, not just cellular) descendants, she also writes about the racism in the medical field and medical ethics as a whole. That the book feels cohesive as well as compelling is a great testament to Skloot's skills as a writer. " Immortal Life reads like a novel," writes Eric Roston in his Washington Post review. "The prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent." For a book that encompasses so much, it never feels baggy. Nearly ten years later, it remains an urgent text, and one that is taught in high schools, universities, and medical schools across the country. It is both an incredible achievement and, simply, a really good read. -Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Wilkerson's history of the Great Migration is a revelation. When we talk about migration in the context of American history, we tend to focus on triumphalist stories of immigrants coming to America, but what about the vast migrations that have happened internally? Between 1920 and 1970, millions of African-Americans migrated North from the prejudice-ridden South, lured by relatively high-paying jobs and relatively less racism. It takes a whole lot to make someone leave their home, and Wilkerson does an excellent job at reminding us how awful life in the South was for Black people (and still is, in many ways). The Warmth of Other Suns is not only fascinating-it's also thrilling, taking us into the lives of hard-scrabble folk who were equal parts refugees and adventurers, and truly epic, telling a great story on a grand scale. Don't think that means there aren't small moments of humanity seeded throughout the book-for every sentence about the conduct of millions, there's a detail that reminds us that we're reading about individuals, with their own hopes, wishes, dreams, and struggles. -Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

While Robert Caro first came to prominence for The Powerbroker, his 1974 biography of divisive urban planner Robert Moses, it's Caro's ongoing multi-volume biography of LBJ, America's most unjustly maligned president (fight me, Kennedy-heads!), that has cemented his legacy. It's hard to pick one in particular to recommend, but The Passage of Power, which covers the years 1958-1964, captures the most tumultuous period of LBJ's life in politics, as he went from feared senator, to side-lined VP, to suddenly becoming the post powerful figure in the world. There's something profoundly moving about the vastness of these works-Caro is 83 now, and has dedicated an enormous part of his life to this singular project. His wife is his only approved research assistant, and together, they've upended half a century of LBJ criticism to reveal the complex, problematic, but always striving core of a sensitive soul.

I had a teacher in high school who spent 20 years working on her dissertation on LBJ. She'd spend each weekend at the LBJ Library at UT Austin, while working full time as a public school teacher, and kicked ass at both. There's something about LBJ that inspires people to dedicate their entire lives to trying to figure him out, and in the process, trying to understand the world that made him, and that he made. Thanks to Caro, we can all understand LBJ a little bit better. -Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Tom Reiss opens his biography of Thomas Alexandre-Dumas, father of author Alexandre Dumas, with a scene that seems right out of an academic heist film. At a library in rural France, Reiss convinces a town official to blow open a safe whose combination was held only by the late librarian. What Reiss discovers are the rudiments of a grand and, until then, largely unknown story of the man who inspired some of his son's most beloved tales. The Black Count is also a case study of complex racial politics during the age of revolutionary France. Dumas was born in 1762 in Saint-Domingue, the French Caribbean colony that would become Haiti. As the son of a French marquis and a freed black slave, Dumas was subject both to the privileges of the former and the kind of indignities suffered by the latter. His father, for instance, sells him into slavery when he is 12 only to purchase his freedom later and bring him to France, where the young man receives an aristocratic education. A final rift from his father prompts Dumas to join the military. Reiss creates a dynamic, if somewhat speculative portrait of Dumas based on letters, reports from battlefields, Dumas' own writings, and more. By the time he is 30, Dumas has vaulted in the ranks from corporal to general and commands a division of more than 50,000 soldiers. It's no accident that the thrilling militaristic feats Reiss describes sound like events out of The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers. Though the general becomes a cavalry commander under Napoleon Bonaparte, Reiss suggests that it was Napoleon himself who ruined Dumas not only from a personal standpoint, but civilizational as well. Napoleon reintroduced slavery in Haiti, after all, in contradiction to the republican dreams of Dumas' contemporary, Toussaint Louverture, another rare and successful 18th-century general of African descent. Reiss unearths the ultimately tragic story of a man who was infamous in his own time for enjoying social and professional advantages that would've been unheard of for a mixed-race man in the US, a nation which of course went through its own revolution one generation earlier. -Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

The premise of Elizabeth Kolbert's Pulitzer-prize-winning book is a simple scientific fact: there have been five mass extinctions in the history of the planet, and soon there will be six. The difference, Kolbert explains, is that this one is caused by humans, who have drastically altered the earth in a short time. She points out on the first page that humans (which is to say, homo sapiens, humans like us) have only been around for two hundred thousand or so years-an incredibly short amount of time to do damage enough to destroy most of earthly life. Kolbert's book is so unique, though, because she combines research from across disciplines (scientific and social-scientific) to prepare an extremely comprehensive, sweeping argument about how our oceans, air, animal populations, bacterial ecosystems, and other natural elements are dangerously adapting to (or dying from) human impact, while also tracing the history of both the approaches to these things (theories of evolution, extinction, and other principles). It's a depressing and horrifying argument on the face of it, but it's made so delicately, even poetically-Kolbert's concerned, occasional first-person narration, and her many interviews with professionals capable of the pithiest, most perfect quotes (not to mention that she interviews these experts, sometimes, over pizza) make this book a conversation, more than a treatise. Kolbert talks us through the headiest, most complicated science, breaking down this mass disaster morsel by morsel. This might be The Sixth Extinction's greatest achievement-it is so smart while also being so quotidian, so urgent while also being so present. And this fits the tone of her argument: our current mass extinction doesn't feel like an asteroid hitting the planet. It's amassed by the small ways in which we live our lives. We are crawling, she illuminates, towards the end of the world. -Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me 1) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015, 2) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and 3) was deemed "required reading" by Toni Morrison. What else is there to say? To call it "timely" or "urgent" or even "a prime example of how the personal is, in fact, political" (as I am tempted to do) does not quite capture the unique, grounding, heartbreaking experience of reading this book. Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Between the World and Me is both a biting interrogation of American history and today's society and an intimate look at the concerns and hopes a father passes down to his son. In just 152 pages, this book touches on the creation of race ("But race is the child of racism, not the father"), the countless acts of violence enacted on black bodies, gun control, and anecdotes from the writer's own life. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic, exercises a journalist's concision and clarity and fuses it with the flourish of a novelist and the caring instinct of a father. It is a wonderful hybrid. The way the topics, the tones, bleed into one another reads so naturally: "I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, and that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store..." The list, of course, goes on. Between the World and Me brilliantly forces us to confront these tragedies again-to remember our own experiences watching the news coverage, to see them in the context of history filtered through Ta-Nehisi Coates' unsurprised perspective, and to see them anew through the eyes of his disillusioned young son. There is an amazing generosity to these personal glimpses, the moments when the writer turns to his son (says "you"). They catch you off guard. (There are even photographs throughout, like a scrapbook you aren't sure if you're allowed to look through.) There have been many books about race, about violence and institutionalized injustice and identity, and there will be more, but none quite so beautifully shattering as this. -Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Andrea Wulf's 2015 biography of 18th-century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt-one of the most famous men of his time, for whom literally hundreds of towns, rivers, currents, glaciers, and more are named-is so much more than the story of a single life. Aside from chronicling a remarkably fertile moment in the history of European ideas (Von Humboldt was good buddies with his neighbor in Weimar, Goethe) Wulf reveals in Humboldt a true forebear of present-day ecology, a jack-of-all-trades scientist less concerned with the reduction of the natural world into its constituent specimens than with our place in a broader ecosystem.

And while it doesn't seem particularly radical now, Humboldt's proto-environmentalist ideas about the wider world, much of which he mapped and explored, stood in stark contrast to prevailing notions of Christian dominion, that dubious theological position conjured up in aid of empire. Insofar as Humboldt was among the first to understand and articulate the complex systems of a living forest, he was also the first to sound the alarm about the impacts of deforestation (much of which he encountered on his epic journey across the northern reaches of South America). Part adventure yarn, part intellectual history, part ecological meditation, The Invention of Nature restores to prominence an exemplary life, and reminds us of the tectonic force of ideas paired to action. -Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

A landmark work of oral history, Svetlana Alexievich's Second-hand Time chronicles the decline and fall of Soviet communism and the rise of oligarchic capitalism. Through a multitude of interviews conducted between 1991 and 2012 with ordinary citizens-doctors, soldiers, waitresses, Communist party secretaries, and writers-Alexievich's account is as important to understanding the Soviet world as Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Second-hand Time first appeared in Russia in 2013 and was translated into English in 2016 by Bella Shayevich. As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker, "There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and Putin's ascent...But the nonfiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich's oral history..." It is shockingly intimate, Alexievich's interviewees sharing their darkest traumas and deepest regrets. In their kitchens, at gravesites, each character tells the story of a nation abandoned by the Kremlin. Like much of Alexievich's work, it is radical in its composition, challenging with its polyphony of distinctive, human voices the "official history" of a society that presented itself as homogeneous and monolithic-an achievement the Nobel committee recognized when it cited the Belorussian journalist for developing "a new kind of literary genre...a history of the soul." Like her more recent The Unwomanly Face of War and Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II, Alexievich's project is one of the most important accounts being produced today. -Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

In addition to being an incredible work of reporting, Jane Mayer's Dark Money is a historical document of what happened to America as a small group of plutocrats funded the rise of political candidates who espoused policies and beliefs that had been, until then, considered a part of the fringe right wing of the Republican Party. Mayer describes this group as "a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted." Mayer's painstakingly reported work is a monumental achievement; she lays out, in as much detail as could possibly be available, the mechanisms that allowed this group to channel their wealth and power, with the help of federal law, to a set of institutions that aim to fight scientific advancement, justice-oriented movements, and climate change. In doing so, they have overhauled American politics. As Alan Ehrenhalt put it in a review of the book for The New York Times, she describes "a private political bank capable of bestowing unlimited amounts of money on favored candidates, and doing it with virtually no disclosure of its source."

The stakes here extend beyond American politics; Mayer points out that Koch money upholds some of the institutions most vigorously fighting climate activism and defending the fossil fuel industry. In 2017, she told the Los Angeles Times, "There are many things you can fix and you can bring back, and there are sort of cycles in American history and the pendulum swings back and forth, but there are things you can damage irreparably, and that's what I'm worried about right this moment ... And that's why this particular book-because it's about the money that is stopping this country from doing something useful on climate change." -Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

To call How to Survive a Plague extensive would be an understatement; France's account of the epidemic's earliest days is overwhelmingly generous, letting the reader experience those days, and everything that followed, from within the community that faced it first. France recounts the ways in which scientists and doctors first responded to the virus, tracing the evolution of that understanding from within a small circle to a broad cry for awareness and resources; meanwhile, he shows how a community of people fighting for their lives mobilized alternative systems of communication, education, and support while facing an almost inconceivable wall of barriers to that work. The importance of language in this fight is at the forefront here, from the scientific question of what to call the virus, to its reputation in popular culture as "gay cancer," to the disagreements within activist groups about how to tell their stories to an unsympathetic world.

This is an enraging history, one of various institutional failures, missed opportunities, hypocrisies, and acts of malice toward a community in crisis, motivated by hatred and horror of queer people and gay men in particular. But I felt equally enraged and in awe. This is a humbling history to read, especially if, like me, you come from a generation of queer people that has been accused of forgetting it. I'm grateful for France's testimony; it won't let any of us forget. -Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Reséndez's The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that's long overdue and badly needed in the present moment. The story of the assault on indigenous peoples in the Americas is perhaps well-known, but what's less known is how many of those people were enslaved by colonizers, how that enslavement led to mass death, and how complicit the American legal system was in bringing that oppression about and sustaining it for years beyond the supposed emancipation in regions in which indigenous peoples were enslaved. This was not an isolated phenomenon. It extended from Caribbean plantations to Western mining interests. It was part and parcel of the European effort to settle the "new world" and was one of the driving motivations behind the earliest expeditions and colonies. Reséndez puts the number of indigenous enslaved between Columbus's arrival and 1900 at somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million people. The institution took many forms, but reading through the legal obfuscation and drilling down into the archival record and first-hand accounts of the eras, Reséndez shows how slavery permeated the continents. Native tribes were not simply wiped out by disease, war, and brutal segregation. They were also worked-against their will, without pay, in mass numbers-to death. It was a sustained and organized enslavement. The Other Slavery also tells the story of uprising-communities that resisted, individuals who fought. It's a complex and tragic story that required a skilled historian to bring into the contemporary consciousness. In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Resendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary. -Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

One night, facing a brief gap between plans with different people, I took Rebecca Traister's All the Single Ladies to a bar. A few minutes after I ordered, deep in Traister's incredible, extensive history of single women in America, a server came over to offer me another, more isolated seat at the end of the bar, "so you don't feel embarrassed about being alone," she said, quietly. I assured her I was okay, trying not to laugh. She was just so worried.

I turned back to my book to find Traister describing this kind of cultural distress- a woman, alone, in public?!-at a new generation of unmarried adult women, who are more autonomous and numerous today than ever before. Far from marking a crisis in the social order, Traister writes, this shift "was in fact a new order ... women's paths were increasingly marked with options, off-ramps, variations on what had historically been a very constrained theme." She examines the history of unmarried women as a social and political force, including the activists who devoted their lives to establishing a greater range of educational, familial, and economic choices for women, with particular attention to the ways in which that history is also one of racial and economic justice in the US. Traister also highlights the networks of social support that women have created in order to survive patriarchy and establish lifestyles that did not depend on it; intimacy and communication among unmarried women, she shows, were the backbone of activist and reform movements that successfully challenged the dominant order.

The book draws on interviews from dozens of women of varying backgrounds, and their firsthand accounts are a portrait of life amid a historic shift toward female autonomy. Their stories, and Traister's analysis, make it clear that even as options for many women are expanding, those options are not equally available or beneficial to all women. This is a stunning reckoning with the state of women's independence and the policies that still seek to curtail it. -Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

In 2017, monuments commemorating heroes of the Confederacy were being debated, defaced and toppled throughout the United States. That same year, months before President Trump signed a law creating a commission to plan for the bicentennial of Frederick Douglass' birth, he infamously seemed to suggest that Douglass was still around, doing an "amazing job" and "getting recognized more and more." The irony was hard to miss: it was easy to eulogize a past that was not comprehensively, nor even fundamentally understood. One achievement of historian David Blight's monumental study of the former slave turned abolitionist is the thoroughness with which it examines the man's development across three autobiographies he produced in the span of ten years. The popular image of Douglass has long been that of a bushy-haired man affixed to Abraham Lincoln's side, delivering rousing speeches on abolition and the sins of slavery. And while there is basic truth to that, Blight sets out to fill the gaps in public understanding, guiding readers from the Maryland slave plantation where Douglass was born to the many stops along his European speech circuit, when he established himself as one of the world's most recognizable opponents of slavery. The vague circumstances of Douglass' birth (he was born to an enslaved woman and a white man who may also have been his owner) later compelled him to create his own life narratives, a task that he accomplished both in writing and oratory. Blight's engagement with Douglass' writing also marks the biography as a triumph of public-facing textual criticism. For decades before Prophet of Freedom astonished critics and general readers, Blight had been making his name as one of the leading Douglass scholars in the US. Blight's work was not historical revisionism, but rather a considered analysis of a man who relied on actions as much as words. Many may be surprised to learn, for example, what a vocal supporter Douglass was of the Civil War and violence as a necessary means to dismantle the system that had nearly destroyed him. Prophet of Freedom feels as definitive as a Robert Fagles translation of Homer-we hope it's not the final word, though it will take quite the successor to produce a worthwhile follow-up. -Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

One hesitates to label any book by a living writer his "magnum opus" but Macfarlane's Underland-a deeply ambitious work that somehow exceeds the boundaries it sets for itself-reads as offertory and elegy both, finding wonder in the world even as we mourn its destruction by our own hand. If you're unfamiliar with its project, as the name would suggest, Underland is an exploration of the world beneath our feet, from the legendary catacombs of Paris to the ancient caveways of Somerset, from the hyperborean coasts of far Norway to the mephitic karst of the Slovenian-Italian borderlands.

Macfarlane has always been a generous guide in his wanderings, the glint of his erudition softened as if through the welcoming haze of a fireside yarn down the pub. Even as he considers all we have wrought upon the earth, squeezing himself into the darker chambers of human creation-our mass graves, our toxic tombs-Macfarlane never succumbs to pessimism, finding instead in the contemplation of deep time a path to humility. This is an epochal work, as deep and resonant as its subject matter, and would represent for any writer the achievement of a lifetime. -Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Attempting, in a single volume, to cover the scale and complexity of the Northern Ireland Troubles-a bloody and protracted political and ethno-nationalist conflict that came to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for over three decades-while also conveying a sense of the tortured humanity and mercurial motivations of some of its most influential and emblematic individual players and investigating one of the most notorious unsolved atrocities of the period, is, well, a herculean task that most writers would never consider attempting. Thankfully, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (whose 2015 New Yorker article on Gerry Adams, "Where the Bodies Are Buried", is a searing precursor to Say Nothing) is not most writers. His mesmerizing account, both panoramically sweeping and achingly intimate, uses the disappearance and murder of widowed mother of ten Jean McConville in Belfast in 1972 as a fulcrum, around which the labyrinthine wider narrative of the Troubles can turn. The book, while meticulously researched and reported (Radden Keefe interviewed over one hundred different sources, painstakingly sorting through conflicting and corroborating accounts), also employs a novelistic structure and flair that in less skilled hands could feel exploitative, but here serves only to deepen our understanding of both the historical events and the complex personalities of ultimately tragic figures like Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and McConville herself-players in an attritional drama who have all too often been reduced to the status of monster or martyr. Once you've caught your breath, what you'll be left with by the close of this revelatory hybrid work is a deep and abiding feeling of sorrow, which is exactly as it should be. -Dan Sheehan, BookMarks Editor

***

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn't let them pass without comment.

For over a decade, Martinez has been a witness and a chronicler of the ground-level effects of the war on drugs, reporting from across Latin America with a special focus on Central America and his home country of El Salvador, where more recently he's been writing about the bloody culture of MS-13 and other narco-cliques that have expanded their power. Before that, he was charting the plight of migrants running the terrible gauntlet across borders and through narco-controlled territories. Martinez rode the dreaded train known as "The Beast" and collected the stories of those traveling north on this perilous journey. While crime isn't strictly the focus of the book, Martinez looks at the direct effects of mass crime at a regional/global level, as well as the outlaw communities springing up to prey on the vulnerable. The subject matter is dark, but Martinez writes with the terrible, piercing clarity of a Cormac McCarthy. The Beast is a dispatch from a nearly lawless land, where families struggle and suffer, narcos get richer, violence spreads, the drugs head north, the guns head south, and so it goes on. Forget the rhetoric, the politics, and the propaganda. The Beast is the real story of the drug war. "Where can you steer clear of bandits?" Martinez asks. "Where do the drugs go over? Where can you avoid getting kidnapped by the narcos? Where is there a spot left with no wall, no robbers, and no narcos? Nobody has been able to answer this last question." To call this book prescient disregards how long our problems have persisted, and how long we've managed to ignore the chaos our country's policies have created. -Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

There are more evictions happening now, per capita, in the United States, than there were during the Great Depression. As it turns out, there's a lot of money to be made from poverty-not, course, for those who need it, but for the landlords who orchestrate the kind of housing turnover that traps people in deeper and longer cycles of debt. Poverty in America has long been conflated with moral failure, but as Matthew Desmond's Evicted illustrates in great detail, if there's any moral failing happening, it's with those who would take advantage of such systemic and generational iniquities.

Desmond, a Princeton-trained sociologist and MacArthur fellow, went to see for himself in 2008, at the height (depths?) of the housing crisis, undertaking a year-long study of eight Milwaukee-area families, spending six months in a mobile home and another six months in a rooming house, creating much more than a journalist's snapshot of life as an American renter. With Evicted, Desmond has widened our perspective on cyclical hardship and its disproportionate impact on people of color, illustrating (with neither the leering nor the condescension of so much reporting on the poor) that eviction is more often a cause of poverty than a symptom. -Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

I recommend this book to those who wish to demonstrate their physical strength in public and show off that they can read a giant Russian history book one-handed, but also I recommend this book to everyone, ever, in the world, because it's so fantastic. At first glance, this is a lengthy tome inspired by a Tolstoyan approach to lyrical history, ostensibly concerned with the history of an apartment complex that was home to much of the early Soviet elite-and was subsequently depopulated by Stalinist purges. Within this apartment building, however, lay the central irony of the revolution-those who believed deeply enough in an idealistic system to embrace violent, repressive means of revolution, were soon enough subjected to those same mechanisms of repression. From this central irony, Slezkine, always concerned with how the micro fits into the macro, zooms out to look at the Soviets as just another bunch of millenarians (and to understand what an insult that is, you'll have to pick up the book). -Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for The Times of London, begins his book by describing the way his office building in Tokyo shook in March 2011 when an earthquake hit the city. He called his family and checked that they were OK and then walked through the streets to see the damage. Used to quakes, this one seemed bad, but not the worst he had lived through. Less than an hour after the earthquake, though, a tsunami killed an estimated 18,500 Japanese men, women and children. In Ghosts, Parry focuses his story on Okawa, a tiny costal village where an entire school and 74 children washed away. In somewhat fragmentary threads, Parry explores the families that survived, the ghosts that follow them, and the landscape of a place that will never be the same. In localizing the story in one community, Parry is able to clearly define the painfully individual fallout of a national tragedy. It is emotionally draining to read, which is a warning I give everyone when I recommend the book (which I do constantly). But it is one of my favorite books and I would be remiss not to include in our list for best nonfiction of the decade. -Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

I grew up in a town named after a body of water-Rye Brook-and went to a high school also named after that body of water-Blind Brook-but growing up, no one seemed to actually know where the brook was, at least none of the kids. We didn't talk about it, except to note its hiddenness- it's behind the school, someone once told me, while another person said it was behind that hotel, behind the park, behind the airport. Recently, I decided to find it on a map and noticed, for the first time, that the brook, far from being a hidden thing, defines the majority of Rye Brook's borders. Recognizing this foundational feature of my hometown for the first time, more than a decade after I left it, was disorienting, completely re-rendering my perception of the place I thought I knew best.

My search that day came after I read Jenny Odell's account of her similar awakening to the ecology of her hometown, Cupertino, and all the features in or around it: Calabazas Creek, nearby mountains, and the San Francisco Bay. "How could I have not noticed the shape of the place I lived?" she writes, and, later, describing her own disorientation in a way that resonates with my own, added, "Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along."

One way of describing the premise of this book is to say "that which has been present all along" is reality itself: each of us, from day to day, living our physical lives in a physical place. But in 2019, life doesn't usually feel like that; it feels like an onslaught of forces that aim to turn our attention away from this reality and monetize it in a shapeless virtual space. In that environment, Odell writes, doing "nothing," or finding any way to disrupt the capitalistic drive to monetize, is an act of political resistance, even as she recognizes that not everyone has the economic security or social capital to opt out. "Just because this right is denied to many people doesn't make it any less of a right or any less important," she writes. This book also draws on philosophy, utopian movements, and labor organizing to describe how various people have attempted to "do nothing" in their own way throughout history, with an outlook that is grounded in ecology. (And bird watching!) Ultimately, Odell writes, the act of doing nothing creates space for the kind of contemplation and reflection that is essential to activism and to sustaining life. I experienced this book as a space of sanity and as a beginning; I hope you do, too. -Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

***

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists-just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Peter Hessler, Country Driving (2010) · Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (2010) · Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy (2010) · Marina Warner, Stranger Magic (2012) · Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012) · Oscar Martinez, The Beast (2013) · Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2013) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2013) · David Epstein, The Sports Gene (2013) · Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial (2013) · David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service (2013) George Packer, The Unwinding (2013) · Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (2013) · Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People's History of the United States (2014) · Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (2014) · Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring (2014) · Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald (2014) · Mary Beard, SPQR (2015) · Sam Quinones, Dreamland (2015) · Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning (2016) · Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson (2016) · Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers In Their Own Land (2016) · Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (2016) · Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (2017) · David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) · Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart (2017) · Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals (2017) · Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown (2017) Michael Tisserand, Krazy (2017) · Lawrence Jackson, Chester Himes (2017)Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon (2018) · Beth Macy, Dopesick (2018) · Shane Bauer, American Prison (2018) · Eliza Griswold, Amity and Prosperity (2018) · David Quammen, The Tangled Tree (2018).

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The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade

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Friends, it's true: the end of the decade approaches. It's been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it's been populated by some damn fine literature. We'll take our silver linings where we can.

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Current Events Capstone/Independent Reading Resources 

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Any museum activity can count as one of your nonfiction sources.

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Black History Month is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time for recognizing the central role of the Black and African American community in U.S. history.

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Harper's Magazine, the oldest general-interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation, through long-form narrative journalism and essays, and such celebrated features as the iconic Harper's Index.

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Soule/Strobel Podcast Padlet (Many Options, Divided by Topic/Interest)

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Soule/Strobel Podcast Padlet (Many Options, Divided by Topic/Interest)

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In December, The New York Times invited noted writers, actors and public figures to share their favorite poems, reaching out to people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Elena Ferrante Tavi Gevinson, Lena Dunham and Junot Díaz, among others.

After reading the published list, Tabia Alexine, a Los Angeles-based curator and creative, was disappointed. "It was a compelling group, but not as diverse and intersectionally colorful as I'd hoped," she explained to The Huffington Post. Soon after, Alexine embarked on a project of her own, reaching out to young writers of color she admired to bring the original list the multiplicity both readers and writers deserve.

Alexine collected the perspectives of 20 new voices, each explaining the power of a single poem. "The responses reflect a spectrum of experience among the writers," she explained. "But I did notice that several poems discussed discovery, social justice, and resistance through existence and survival."

Looking forward, Alexine hopes future articles in outlets like The New York Times will represent a wider range of backgrounds and perspectives. And that the cultural landscape at large will follow suit. "I hope to see poetry and art by talented persons of color more widely distributed via TV, film, in commercials, at events, galleries, and conferences," she continued. "I love seeing books like The Breakbeat Poets sold at major retailer, Barnes & Noble. I also believe performance poets and writers deserve increased honorariums for their work. I want to be a catalyst, pushing all of those things forward."

Right in time for Black History Month, Alexine's diversified anthology speaks to the importance of poetry to voices too often marginalized or silenced. "It can be such a powerful platformfor truth-telling, disruption, affirmation, and empathy," she said. "The vulnerability and realness I've witnessed within the poetry world is unlike any other medium in my mind. These 20 individuals are unapologetically taking up space and making noise as writers, activists, performers, educators, literary editors, students, and so much more."

Learn about their favorite poems, and the stories behind them:

1. Jamila Woods

"I recently discovered Audre Lorde's poetry collection, The Black Unicorn, on a friend's bookshelf. ' A Woman Speaks' struck me because of the economy of language and her unapologetic declaration of her power as a black woman. I love the lines: 'moon marked and touched by sun / my magic is unwritten' and, 'beware my smile / I am treacherous with old magic and the noon's new fury.'

"To me this poem is a mantra and an affirmation. Black girl magic is not a new phenomenon. Audre Lorde's poem gives me permission to own my magic and inspires me to constantly search for new language to describe it."

Jamila Woods is a singer and poet based in Chicago. She is Associate Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors and member of the Dark Noise Collective.

2. Fatimah Asghar

"I've read 'Delores Jepps' by Tim Seibles every single day since the new year has started. I love Tim's work in general: his playful narrative explorations, his love songs to the world, his persona poems. He's such a versatile and splendid writer. This poem is my favorite in the collection Fast Animal. It's such a sweet memory of infatuation and the innocence in it is such a delight: 'she'd be standing soaked / in schoolday morning light' and 'the gloss on her lips sighed / kiss me and you'll never / do homework again.'

"I love the way that Tim explores these wonderfully simple moments, the loneliness of youth and how a teenage heart full of love and longing can sometimes be enough to serve as protection from the cruelty of the world."

Fatimah Asghar is a poet based in Chicago, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her chapbook, "After," was published by YesYes Books in the fall of 2015.

3. Camonghne Felix

"This poem allows me to feel joy and happiness while still confronting the violence of rape. Instead of reflecting on the pain of the assault and the person who hurt me, I reflect on the first time I willingly gave myself to someone. I reflect on how loved, protected and beautiful I feel every time I am with my current partner. It reminds me that, though the assault may have left my dignity compromised, it wasn't stolen. My body is still mine. The choice is still mine. And I am nobody's victim, especially because I survived. 'God bless the girl who goes back for her body.'"

4. Alok Vaid Menon

"In a cultural moment when trans narratives are only invited to the table when we are inspirational and resilient, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza creates a space for us to be trans and angry, trans and sad, trans and hurt. I think her work is so politically important this poem in particular is striking to me with how unapologetic it is, with how powerful the vision is of a world where transness is just accepted simply for being, not just for doing."

Alok Vaid Menon is a South Asian trans femme performance artist and one half of the performance art duo DarkMatter.

5. Joshua Bennett

"Oh, and 'I know this isn't much. / But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if / I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.' is one of my favorite passages of text in the English language. Those are lines to live by, for sure."

6. Jacqui Germain

7. Janani Balasubramanian

"As a sci-fi/speculative fiction writer, I often think about the linkages between racialized histories and the arc of major sci-fi narratives. Why is Jennifer Lawrence the star of 'Hunger Games'? Beats me. My favorite poem isn't quite a poem, but it is 'poetic' and those boundaries don't make sense anyway since we're all just trying to whisper truths into an unforgiving, acheful universe. So here's a 'poetic quote' from one of my favorite nerds, Junot Diaz:

Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for race, X-Men doesn't sense. If it wasn't for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction's contact stories doesn't make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We're the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things -- erased, and yet without us -- we are essential.

"I really believe in us: the nerds and the dreamers and the aliens and the bacteria not quite of this world. And I return to this pithy quote quite often while trudging through the unglamorous and lonely act of noveling (setting empathy to page). We have so much imagining to do."

Janani Balasubramanian is an artist, nerd, and one half of the performance art duo DarkMatter.

8. Joshua Aiken

Joshua Aiken is a poet and playwright whose work has been featured in publications such as the Winter Tangerine Review, Assaracus, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by cahoodaloodaling. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he is currently a graduate student at the University of Oxford.

9. Danez Smith

Danez Smith is the author of Don't Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and [insert] Boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award. They have been featured widely including on Buzzfeed, Blavity & in Poetry Magazine and are a member of the Dark Noise Collective.

10. Safia Elhillo

"This introduces us to the violence that blue can also contain, that is not immediately associated with it but is just as much a part of it as a smooth sheet of lake or ocean with troubled waters just underneath. Everything in its world seems born of this single 'blue vein / that rides,' and one need not actively pursue it because it will be there, as it has always been there."

11. Nate Marshall

"One of my favorite poems of all time is Martin Espada's joint 'Imagine the Angels of Bread.' I came across it in high school and I've never been able to shake it. This poem speaks so powerfully about the possibility of a new kind of justice beginning today. I find a lot of poetry that speaks to social issues is either pessimistic, angry, or depressing and this poem always reminds me that the role of the artist is, in part, to imagine the next world of expanded freedom."

Nate Marshall is the author of Wild Hundreds and editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of HipHop. He is also a member of the Dark Noise Collective.

12. Janae Johnson

Janae Johnson is a spoken word poet, teaching artist, educator and co-founder of The House Slam poetry venue in Boston. She is the 2015 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion and 2015 National Poetry Slam Champion.

13. Hieu Minh Nguyen

"Out of all my favorite poems, I return most to Jason Shinder's 'Untitled.' I am constantly in awe of its tenderness. It's the last poem in his last book, Stupid Hope (published posthumously), and every time I finish the last couplet, 'Let me / Let me keep on describing things to be sure they happened.' my face becomes a hole."

14. Franny Choi

Franny Choi is a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellow, a Project VOICE teaching artist, a member of the Dark Noise Collective, and the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing).

15. Porsha O.

"I believe in poetic monologues. I believe in narrative. I believe in the use of vulgarity to disrupt conventional language. In 'Rhonda, Age 15 Emergency Room,' I think what I believe in most is Letta Neely 's highlighting of intersectionality. Rhonda, the narrator is a teenaged person, a poor person, Black, a woman, queer, and an academically at risk student who is also a victim of the prison industrial complex. This poem completely tears at my heart with its blunt and consistent oppression while simultaneously giving me hope as a poor Black lesbian, who spends much of her time with young folk who walk through the world with so many things to carry.

"I have no choice but to believe in Rhonda's potential because it is directly tied to my own. I know that even after the poem is over, Rhonda is alive, in an emergency room, narrating her story, and still actively waking up to survive everyday, in what I imagine to be, the most revolutionary of ways."

Porsha O. is the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion, the 2015 National Poetry Slam Champion, and the co-founder of House Slam. She identifies as a Black, poet, dykegoddess, a hiphop feminist, an educator, and an organizer.

16. Carvens Lissaint

Carvens Lissaint is an international award-winning poet and currently a MFA candidate at NYU Tisch School of The Arts Graduate Acting Program.

17. Aziza Barnes

Aziza Barnes is blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles Aziza currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi. Aziza's is the author of i be but i ain't (Yes Yes Books, 2015) and me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun published from Button Poetry. Aziza is a member of The Dance Cartel and the divine fabrics collective.

18. Malcolm London

"I was in classes with kids wealthier than me and though I loved them, I envied them and this poem told me it was natural to want to have. That wanting to not be stopped by police on my way home, to want to not see my mom and pops struggle just to keep a roof over their heads, to want to be able to afford college, to want to have money to go out to off-campus lunch with my friends, to ask why can't we live in a world where all kids in Chicago can have access to all the things my more wealthier white double honors classmates had. This poem, incredible in the way it humanizes people, both well off and not so, empowered me to start asking the right questions."

Called the Gil Scott-Heron of his generation by Cornel West, Malcolm London is an internationally recognized Chicago poet, organizer, performer and educator. London, who is mostly known for declining modeling opportunities to dedicate his life to art education and activism, is currently working on releasing two anticipated art projects in 2016.

19. Aaron Samuels

20. Yosimar Reyes

"Being raised by women, gender dynamics of labor were evident in our Latino household, but here was Cisneros writing about a quiet revolution, one where a young girl made the choice to live a life free of cultural expectations. As a queer feminine latino boy, this helped me imagine a world where my Latino culture did not limit me but one where I could embrace the good and leave what did not seem appropriate to me."

Yosimar Reyes is a nationally acclaimed poet, educator, performance artist and public speaker. Born in Guerrero, Mexico, and raised in Eastside San Jose, Calif.k Reyes holds a B.A. in creative writing and is an Arts Fellow at Define American, an organization founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas.

For more on the beauty of slam poetry, check out our video series with Aja Monet, Shira Erlichman and Monica McClure.

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20 Young Writers Of Color Share Their Favorite Poems

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"The vulnerability and realness I've witnessed within the poetry world is unlike any other medium in my mind."

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Poets happen to be the only rock stars I've ever looked up to. Because that's what poets do. They make you look up and meet their eye as they express every sorrow, joy and regret with as much honesty as they can muster. They make you smile, chuckle, tear up and sometimes full-blown ugly cry as they voice the emotions you didn't even know you felt. When poets of color talk about the nuances of racism, supremacy or even the everyday details of their life; I want to soak in all the gloriousness.

I am more creative, more aware and more empathetic for having found my way to poetry. I hope everyone comes across a poet they are either completely in awe with or one who makes their chaotic existence a little easier. To help the process, here's a list of gorgeous poems written and performed with passion by poets of color.

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1) Hair by Elizabeth Acevedo

" They say Dominicans can do the best hair. I mean they wash, set, flatten the spring in any loc - but what they mean is we're the best at swallowing amnesia, in a cup of morisoñando, die dreaming because we'd rather do that than live in this reality, caught between orange juice and milk, between reflections of the sun and whiteness. What they mean is, "Why would you date a black man?" What they mean is, "a prieto cocolo" What they mean is, "Why would two oppressed people come together? It's two times the trouble." What they really mean is, "Have you thought of your daughter's hair?" And I don't tell them that we love like sugar cane, brown skin, pale flesh, meshed in pure sweetness. "

Books by Elizabeth Acevedo: The Poet X , Clap When You Land

2) The Introvert's Banter by Rabia Kapoor

"I don't really have anything to say that hasn't been said before
I don't have any claims to make that haven't been claimed before
I don't have any movements to organize that haven't been moved before
But I like to write, and I like people to listen
and I've never really been heard before."

"The word repurpose,
It means to take an object and give it amnesia.
It means to make something forget what it's been trained to do so you can use it for a better reason.
I am learning that this body is not a shotgun.
I am learning that this body is not a pistol.
I am learning that a man is not defined by what he can destroy. I am learning that a person who only knows how to fight can only communicate in violence,
And that shouldn't be anyone's first language.
I'm learning that the only difference between a garden and a graveyard is what you choose to put in the ground.
You see, once, I came across a picture of a strange-looking violin.
The caption said that it was made out of a rifle.
I thought to myself, 'Someday that could be me'."

Books by Rudy Francisco: Helium, I'll Fly Away

4) Where Are You Really From? by Priya Malik

"Yes I'm brown like my mother's puris that she only savors on special occasions. Yes I'm brown like that little birthmark on my father's wrist. Yes I'm brown like my sister's cinnamon coated laughter.
I should be lucky for my natural tan but I'm not brown for the love of your solarium.
I am not an exotic sauce for your stir fry.
No I will not be your token foreigner friend.
So next time you ask me where I'm from-where I'm really, really from?
I will tell you that I'm from my mother's goddamn womb. Why, how about you?"

5) Defiance, Ohio is the Name of a Band by Hanif Abdurraqib

"And so when the band sings
Here's to this year I never thought I'd make it through
I put my arms around someone else who did make it and swayed along as a clock swung itself past midnight at the end of December
And I saw Defiance, band in another sweaty room in '07
And everyone there was sad
So no one was into fighting that night
And the band with the cello and the band with the banjo strings stood thick and heavy in the air
No one seemed to mind
It's like if we all try hard enough in the same room
Everyone can remember what it is to lose somebody at the same time"

Books by Hanif Abdurraqib: The Crown Ain't Worth Much, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, A Fortune for Your Disaster

6) The Period Poem by Dominique Christina
"women know how to let things go, how to let a dying thing leave the body, how to become new, how to regenerate, how to wax and wane, not unlike the moon and tides, both of which influence how you behave, I digress. Women have vaginas that can speak to each other and by this I mean, when we're with our friends, our sisters, our mothers, our menstrual cycles will actually sync the fuck up. My own cervix is mad influential, everybody I love knows how to bleed with me. Hold on to that, there's a metaphor in it."
Books by Dominique Christina: They Are All Me, This Is Woman's Work
"There will be many times when you will be uncomfortable in my silence unsure of how I am feeling. Understand that just because I don't wear my heart on my sleeve for everyone to see does not mean it beats any softer than yours. Do not confuse the stillness of lips with rhythm of apathy. Do not confuse the sound of words rounding off 80 beats per minute with the music of an actual conversation just because I cannot commit the act of small talk does not mean I don't have huge things to say. Just because I find peace within myself does not mean that I could ever stop wanting to love so hard."
8) Dear White America by Danez Smith
"You asked "why does it always have to be about race?" Because you made it that way. Put an asterisk next to my sister's gorgeous face, call her pretty for a black girl because black girls go missing without a whisper of where. Because there are no amber alerts for the amber skinned girls"
Books by Danez Smith: Don't Call Us Dead, Homie

Books by Lucille Clifton: The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000
"mashallah I claim them all
my country is made
in my people's image
"I'm just a 25 year old public school teacher who continuously questions everything he's ever known. We have skin of a common complexion but a lifetime of experiences more dissimilar than the solar system. So who am I to come into this classroom and tell you what to do. A quarter lifetime's worth of missteps have taught me that my savior complex is something I need to shed from my skin so trust that I'm not trying to save you because I'm still trying to save myself. Honestly, how can I teach him to believe in Plato when gentrification taught to me is nothing more than Plato, something to be moved and molded at will by those doing the sculpting so there's only one thing left to do-become the sculptor and not the sculpted, become the statistician and not the statistic." if they come for you they
come for me too in the dead
"I'm not here to obey your binary, I'm not here to make you comfortable. I'm here to free myself. I am surrendering my body to the desert wind. I surrender my body to the fire. I burn everything I touch as I race to freedom. I mean gender queer. Gender queer makes me nobody's son or daughter. Being gender queer makes me nobody's lover. Everyone I know and love is gone. Everyone I have known and loved has disowned me. That's why I must own myself. I own myself. I am the sky burning red and scorched with heat. I am the Sun swallowing this entire galaxy and I am the failure of his imagination when God made me in His image. I'm God giving himself a second chance. I'm God starting over and saying saying let there be light so these fools can see me for who I am." of winter a flock of
aunties step out on the sand
their dupattas turn to ocean
a colony of uncles grind their palms
& a thousand jasmines bell the air
my people I follow you like constellations"
Books by Fatimah Asghar: After, If They Come for Us: Poems

11) Aristotle by Clint Smith

Books by Clint Smith: Counting Descent

12) He/She by Paul Tran
"A friend once told me that romance is like a house. You the girl, open the window and he the boy, climbs in. Hey asshole, the window is open. But that's when I start wondering why I'm standing at a house. A house built by a generation of men and women who have a habit of putting people in pretty boxes. I wonder what broken architect laid these bricks. To have me here walking the corridors of my own mind seeing the remnants of a guy who doesn't belong there, his hand print on the mirror and silhouette at the corner table. I open my eyes. He once said I'm cute when I'm angry. Well, I'm about to look phenomenal."
13) vocabulary by Safia Elhillo

"fact: the arabic word هواء (hawa) means wind
the arabic word هوى (hawa) means love

test: (multiple choice)
abdelhalim said you left me holding wind in my hands
or abdelhalim said you left me holding love in my hands

abdelhalim was left empty
or
abdelhalim was left full

fairouz said o wind, take me to my country
or
fairouz said o love, take me to my country

fairouz is looking for vehicle
or
fairouz is looking for fuel

oum kalthoum said where the wind stops her ships, we stop ours or
oum kalthoum said where love stops her ships, we stop ours

oum kalthoum is stuck
or
oum kalthoum is home"

Books by Safia Elhillo: The January Children, The Life and Times of Susie Knuckles

14) Why I Haven't Told You Yet by Emi Mahmoud

Books by Emi Mahmoud: Sisters' Entrance

Click here to be introduced to more modern poets of color.

Also, check out these lists of beautiful love poems, moving poem about depression, super short poems and poems about life.

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14 Gorgeous Poems Written and Performed By Poets of Color

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Poets happen to be the only rock stars I've ever looked up to. Because that's what poets do. They make you look up and meet their eye as they express every sorrow, joy and regret with as much honesty as they can muster.

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Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.

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David Barber is poetry editor of The Atlantic, where he has been a staff editor since 1994. Barber has taught writing and literature at Middlebury College, the Harvard Writing Program, MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, and the Emerson College graduate writing program. He also writes on natural history, music, and art.

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Poetry Out Loud encourages the study of great poetry. The program helps students master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about literary history and contemporary life.

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News about Poetry and Poets, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.

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The quirky ex-cast member came back to the sketch show, only to disappear into it.

If he wins a second term, perhaps we'll finally dispense with the myth that "this is not who we are."

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You're probably part of the problem.

The newsletter platform's lax content moderation creates an opening for white nationalists eager to get their message out.

"Our words do much of our thinking for us; we are necessarily manipulated by them." (From 1975)

The author recounts her adventures with the King of Siam. (From 1870)

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Star Crossed
The idea of the celebrity couple was born in 1963, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, whose excessive fervency paved the way for Posh Spice and David Beckham, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Andrew O'Hagan considers our extra-human obsession with famous romantic pairings, which parry the joys of domestic life with the task of world domination.

The night before everything came to an end, Ms. Prosper finally agreed to sing for us.

She was a serious woman, a small woman with a heavy manner, though some later recalled a twinkle in her eye, and others a dry sense of humor.

I remember only that her presence was full of undescribed life and uncheapened by conclusions. Continue reading "

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How Cecil Beaton Helped Invent Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret

The bon vivant royal photographer made portraits of the Windsors for more than 50 years, helping establish their legacy in the public eye. A new book from the Victoria and Albert Museum offers an intimate view of his mythmaking work.

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Sharing the best nonfiction storytelling on the web since 2011.

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Like a growing amount of the world,, I spend a great deal of time online. Trust me, that's not a judgement. It is as though the internet created and holds most of my favorite things. I especially love reading stories from authors that are available for free. I remember the pride I felt browsing the old Syfy website and finding "Book of Martha" by Octavia Butler. There was a moment and it might have happened for me very late in the night. It is in that spirit that I present you with a list of authors I've previously delighted in and works of theirs I found online. Some of them I found through random great sites that I'm so glad I found ( http://www.freesfonline.de/index.html) and for some them all I had to do was search the author's site. I hope this saves you some time and gives you a feel of these authors.

Before I begin this list, let me just say that is a great resource....and it is all legal.

1. Book of Martha by Octavia Butler (They tried to take it but the internet said "No!")
http://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/butler2/butler21.html

5. The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel Delany (okay, this is a full novel)
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41981

10. Wherever You Go There You Are by Danielle Evans (This is a cheat because it's not the whole story and it's a video of her reading half the short story. So...enjoy!)
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/134259250/watch-danielle-evans-short-story-reading-at-npr

And that concludes my list. Ten is the magic list number so I just know I missed a number of great shiny things online. Please leave the short stories/stories/videos related to stories in the comments.

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10 Short Stories by Fantastic Writers of Color For Free! - Blog - Nerdgasm Noire Network

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Like a growing amount of the world,, I spend a great deal of time online. Trust me, that's not a judgement. It is as though the internet created and holds most of my favorite things. I especially love reading stories from authors that are available for free.

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Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language; it's high time to do the same for short stories. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What does "iconic" mean in this context? Can a short story really be iconic in the way of a poem, or a painting, or Elvis?

Well, who knows, but for our purposes, "iconic" means that the story has somehow wormed its way into the general cultural consciousness-a list of the best short stories in the English language would look quite different than the one below. (Also NB that in this case we're necessarily talking about the American cultural consciousness, weird and wiggly as it is.) When something is iconic, it is a highly recognizable cultural artifact that can be used as a shorthand-which often means it has been referenced in other forms of media. You know, just like Elvis. (So for those of you heading to the comments to complain that these stories are "the usual suspects"-well, exactly.) An iconic short story may be frequently anthologized, which usually means frequently read in classrooms, something that can lead to cultural ubiquity-but interestingly, the correlation isn't perfect. For instance, Joyce's "Araby" is anthologized more often, but for my money "The Dead" is more iconic. Film adaptations and catchy, reworkable titles help. But in the end, for better or for worse, you know it when you see it. Which means that, like anything else, it all depends on your point of view-icon status is (like most of the ways we evaluate art) highly subjective.

So, having acknowledged that there's no real way to make this list, but because this is what we're all here to do, here are some of the most iconic short stories for American readers in the English language-and a few more that deserve to be more iconic than they are.

Washington Irving, "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820)
I agonized over whether I should pick "Rip Van Winkle" or "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" from Irving's oeuvre. Both have many, many adaptations to their name and are so ubiquitous as to have drifted into the folklore realm. The latter certainly has more memorable recent adaptations, but the former is the only one with a bridge named after it. Ah, screw it, we'll count them both.

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843)
Poe's early stream-of-consciousness horror story, unreliable narrator and heart beating under the floorboards and all, is certainly one of the most adapted-and even more often referenced-short stories in popular culture, and which may or may not be the source for all of the hundreds of stories in which a character is tormented by a sound only they can hear. (Still not quite as ubiquitous as Poe himself, though . . .)

Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853)
Once, while I was walking in Brooklyn, carrying my Bartleby tote bag, a woman in an SUV pulled over (on Atlantic Avenue, folks) to excitedly wave at me and yell "Melville! That's Melville!" Which is all you really need to know about that.

Henry James, "The Turn of the Screw" (1898)
Technically a novella, but discussed enough as a story that I'll include it here (same goes for a couple of others on this list, including "The Metamorphosis"). It has, as a work of literature, inspired a seemingly endless amount of speculation, criticism, unpacking, and stance-taking. "In comment after comment, article after article, the evidence has been sifted through and judgments delivered," Brad Leithauser wrote in The New Yorker. Fine, intelligent readers have confirmed the validity of the ghosts (Truman Capote); equally fine and intelligent readers have thunderously established the governess's madness (Edmund Wilson)." And nothing that inspires so much interpretive interest could escape the many interpretations into other media: films, episodes of television, and much other literature.

O. Henry, "The Gift of the Magi" (1905)
According to Wikipedia, there have been 17 different film adaptations of O. Henry's classic short story about a couple's thwarted Christmas; the essential format-Della sells her hair to buy Jim a watch chain; Jim sells his watch to buy Della a set of combs-has been referenced and replicated countless times beyond that. I even heard Dax Shepard refer to this story on his podcast the other day, and so I rest my case.

James Joyce, "The Dead" (1914)
The last story in Joyce's collection Dubliners and one of the best short stories ever written; just ask anyone who wanted to have read some Joyce but couldn't crack Ulysses. (Or anyone who could crack Ulysses too.) And let's not forget the John Huston movie starring Anjelica Huston as Gretta.

Richard Connell, "The Most Dangerous Game" aka "The Hounds of Zaroff" (1924)
"The most popular short story ever written in English" is obviously the one about aristocrats hunting people. Widely adapted, but one of my favorite versions is the episode of Dollhouse in which a Richard Connell (no relation except the obvious) hunts Echo with a bow.

Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" (1948)
The short story that launched a thousand letters to The New Yorker-or if not a thousand, then at least "a torrent . . . the most mail the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction." Still taught widely in schools, and still chilling.

J. D. Salinger, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948)
The very first story to destroy many a young mind. In a good way, obviously.
Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950)
Bradbury's work has thoroughly permeated pop culture; plenty of his stories are widely adapted and referenced, so I could have chosen a few others here ("The Veldt" is my personal favorite). But every year, the image of a smart house going on long after the death of its occupants becomes more chilling and relevant an image; we can't help but keep going back to it.

Daphne du Maurier, "The Birds" (1952)
I know it's really the Hitchcock film adaptation that's iconic, but you wouldn't have the Hitchcock without the du Maurier.

Elmore Leonard, "Three-Ten to Yuma" (1953)
I know, I know, it's "Fire in the Hole" that gave us Justified, and we're all so very glad. But "Three-Ten to Yuma" has more name recognition-after all, it was adapted into two separate and very good films, the former of which (1957) actually created contemporary slang: in Cuba, Americans are called yumas and the United States is La Yuma.

Philip K. Dick, "The Minority Report" (1956)
As a whole, Philip K. Dick's work has had massive influence on literature, film, pop culture, and our cultural attitudes toward technology. Most of his best-known works are novels, but when a short story gets made into a Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise film, you're basically assuring iconic status right there. (Or at least that's how it used to work...)

James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues" (1957)
Baldwin's best known short story pops up in plenty of anthologies, and can be thanked for being the gateway drug for many budding Baldwin acolytes.

Alan Sillitoe, "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" (1959)
Not only is the story itself widely known and read-just ask Rod Blagojevich ( remember him?)-that title has been rewritten and reused thousands of times for varying ends-just ask the reporter who wrote that piece about Blagojevich. Or Adrian Tomine.

Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1966)
Another frequently anthologized and unwaveringly excellent short story; and look, it's no one's fault that Laura Dern turns everything she touches iconic.

Toni Cade Bambara, "The Lesson" (1972)
Yet another story often assigned in schools (the good ones, anyway), which hopefully means one day we'll wake up and find out that everyone has read it.

Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl" (1978)
Another staple of a writer's education, and a reader's; "are you really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?" being a kind of bandied-about shibboleth.

Raymond Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (1981)
I struggled choosing a Carver story for this list-"Cathedral" is more important, and probably more read, but "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" has transcended its own form more completely, at least with its title, which has spawned a host of echoes, including Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, to the point that I think it's recognizable to just about everyone. A quick Google search will reveal that the framing has been used for almost everything you can think of. There's-and I kid you not-a What We Talk About When We Talk About Books/War/Sex/God/The Tube/Games/Rape/Money/Creative Writing/Nanoclusters/Hebrew/The Weather/Defunding the Police/Free Speech/Taxes/Holes/Climate/The Moon/Waste/Cancel Culture/Impeachment/Gender/Digital Inclusions/Exacerbations of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease/COVID-19. You see what I'm getting at here.

Lorrie Moore, "How to Be an Other Woman" (1985)
A very very good short story that has given rise to so many bad ones.

Mary Gaitskill, "Secretary" (1988)
Bad Behavior is iconic as a whole, but probably the story to have most acutely permeated the wider culture is "Secretary," on account of the film adaptation starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader-despite the fact that it totally butchers the ending.

Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain" (1997)
Everybody knows this story-even if they only know it from its (massively successful and influential, not to mention the true Best Picture Winner of 2006) film adaptation-and not for nothing, coming out when it did, it went a long way towards making some Americans more comfortable with homosexuality. Open the floodgates, baby.

Jhumpa Lahiri, "A Temporary Matter" (1998)
The story that made Lahiri a household name.

Alice Munro, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (2001)
At this point, almost everyone has read at least some Alice Munro, right? This story is one of the best from one of the greats, and was also adapted into a fantastic but heartbreaking film, Away From Her.

Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person" (2017)
Sure, it's recent, so it's not quite as ingrained as some of the others here, but it's also the story that broke the internet-and quite possibly the only New Yorker story that thousands of people have ever read.

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Finally, as is often the case with lists that summarize the mainstream American literary canon of the last 200 years, it is impossible not to recognize that the list above is much too white and male. So for our future and continuing iconography, your friends at Literary Hub suggest reading the following stories, both new and old:

Eudora Welty, "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941)
Clarice Lispector, "The Imitation of the Rose" (1960)
Leslie Marmon Silko, "The Man to Send Rain Clouds" (1969)
Ralph Ellison, "Cadillac Flambé" (1973)
Octavia Butler, "Bloodchild" (1984)
Bharati Mukherjee, "The Management of Grief" (1988)
John Edgar Wideman, "Fever" (1990)
Sandra Cisneros, "Woman Hollering Creek" (1991)
Christine Schutt, "To Have and to Hold" (1996)
ZZ Packer, "Brownies" (2003)
Edward P. Jones, "Marie" (2004)
Karen Russell, "Haunting Olivia" (2005)
Kelly Link, "Stone Animals" (2005)
Edwidge Danticat, "Ghosts" (2008)
Yiyun Li, "A Man Like Him" (2008)
Claire Vaye Watkins, "Ghosts, Cowboys" (2009)
Ottessa Moshfegh, "Bettering Myself" (2013)
Amelia Gray, "House Heart" (2013)
Zadie Smith, "Meet the President!" (2013)
Carmen Maria Machado, "The Husband Stitch" (2014)
Diane Cook, "The Way the End of Days Should Be" (2014)
Kirstin Valdez Quade, "Five Wounds" (2015)
NoViolet Bulawayo, "Shhhh" (2015)
Mariana Enriquez, "Spiderweb" (2016)
Ken Liu, "State Change" (2016)
Helen Oyeyemi, "Sorry Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea" (2016)
Lesley Nneka Arimah, "What Is a Volcano?" (2017)
James McBride, "The Christmas Dance" (2017)
Viet Thanh Nguyen, "War Years" (2017)
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, "Friday Black" (2018). . .

Honestly, this list could go on forever, but let's stop and say: more short stories of all kinds in the hands of the general public, please!

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43 of the Most Iconic Short Stories in the English Language

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Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language; it's high time to do the same for short stories. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What do...

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Short Stories

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by Collection & Author Children's stories bless us twice. The first time they are read to us. The second time, we read them to a child. Over six hundred figurative phrases English students should know. A collection of great stories, especially about ghosts-- scary stories to lift your spirits for Halloween!

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Below are a collection of online articles featuring free online short story recommendations that you can immediately read. Please check back as we will continuously update.

3 very effective tips to make your bodybuilding more efficient 18 Great Short Stories You Can Read Free Online - by Sarah Ullery (March 19, 2019). Book Riot Online. The creator of this list has compiled her own short story collection onto a phone app to read, which she compares to a music playlist created to "match a mood." Ullery also offers suggestions for finding great stories online.
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Short Story Month: Best short stories to read online for free - by Tracy Mumford (May 15, 2015). Minnesota Public Radio® (MPR). MPR News celebrated Short Story Month with a collection of six free "sensational" short stories that includes preview quotes from each story as well as an estimated read time.

13 of the Best Short Stories You Can Read Right Now - by Michelle Hart (July 17, 2019). The Oprah Magazine. "Thirteen of our favorite short stories, from irrefutable classics by Jamaica Kincaid and Flannery O'Connor to newer additions to the pantheon-spanning crime, magical realism, and snackable tales you can devour on the beach."

28 Short Stories You Can Read for Free Right Now - by Jennifer Martin and BookBub Editors (Updated March 11, 2020). BoobBub Online. You'll need to create a free login to BookBub and answer several questions about your reading preferences to access. "These stories are by contemporary authors. If you've never read these authors before, their free short stories will give you a taste of their style before you commit to one of their longer works. There's something for everyone, with genres ranging from science fiction to historical fiction to horror."

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Below are a collection of online articles featuring free online short story recommendations that you can immediately read. Please check back as we will continuously update. 3 very effective tips to make your bodybuilding more efficient 18 Great Short Stories You Can Read Free Online - by Sarah Ullery (March 19, 2019).

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The Blue People of the desert continent on the Planet Miln have never been in space, as far as their ancestral memories go. Among the sand dunes and the whirling dust devils of the Southern Continent, they lead nomadic lives, content to traverse, generation after generation, the shifting pathways across the great desert. In all their remembered history, only one of them has ever traveled to the Northern Continent and beyond, never to return. The Blue People do not speak to the Northerners.

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LIghtspeed Magazine: edited by John Joseph Adams

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The Blue People of the desert continent on the Planet Miln have never been in space, as far as their ancestral memories go. Among the sand dunes and the whirling dust devils of the Southern Continent, they lead nomadic lives, content to traverse, generation after generation, the shifting pathways across the great desert.