Convulsing, she asks, “Who’s gonna save me?” The plea repeats in different pitches until she is left lying prone, still ...

Dystopian survival amidst environmental breakdown. Violent conflicts over fresh water and arable land. Total societal collapse. Most of today’s climate fiction focuses on impending doom, but Kawai ...

On the second week of her administrative leave, in that hour of morning after Greg left for work, when Aleena, too, should be fighting highway traffic but was instead grounded at home feeling strange ...

There is a video I have watched only once. A man in Al Fashir, in Sudan’s Darfur region, holds his phone to his face. He is calling his son. The footage moves the way all footage of this kind moves, ...

I have a scar that runs from my hip to my knee, and for years I described it the way a doctor would: fracture, plate, six screws. The morning before the surgery, I remember staring at the ceiling of a ...

I expected Dr. Robert Lamb to be a brash, quick-moving former pre-med like the ones I’d slept with just after college. But when I met him in the exam room, he had Teddy-bear eyes, large and ...

Hernan Diaz’s Ply (Riverhead Books, 2026) is a work of unapologetic maximalism. It is a Dickensian story of an orphan mastering an illicit trade; a plot-driven noir; a pointed exploration of our ...

I rested my hand on my friend’s back, ready at any moment to hold her hair, as she dry-heaved into the movie theater hedges. When we decided to see The Substance on its opening night, before the hype ...

Twenty-two years of tinnitus. Eleven different medications. Acupuncture is the only thing that works, and I don’t believe in acupuncture. I lie face down on a folding table covered with a beach towel ...

Psychiatry was treating its patients as biological machines. That was George Engel’s fear in the 1970s when he proposed the biopsychosocial model: an insistence that biology, psychological history, ...

In the collection Visitations (Knopf 2026), legendary writer Julia Alvarez returns to her first love, poetry. She revisits familiar subjects in this beloved form: love, loss, her childhood in the ...

If the past year was one of tenuous accountability—of the things we are doing to our planet, to each other—it was also one of strong writing that sought to disturb, to implicate readers in problems ...