"Nobody finds what they're looking for here. This is the land of surprises." The word Patagonia conjures images of dramatic, untamed landscapes for me: snow-capped peaks, turquoise lakes, endless glaciers populated by penguins and...

"I look at the Mississippi and see America's symbol, the backbone of a nation, representing strength, freedom, pride, mobility, history, and imagination." In the late '80s, Eddy Harris dreamed up something slightly insane...

"China exists beyond dreams. Beyond reality. It's a simulation of both." May 2024: Alexandre Labruffe accepts a position as cultural attaché in a Chinese city few of us had heard of then—Wuhan, in...

"Not to brag, but I'm exceptionally skilled at turning what should be a happy life into genuine hell, and I won't let anyone dismiss that hell lightly: it's real, terrifyingly real." I'd never read Emmanuel Carrère before...

"Men think they know everything about the desert, just like they think they know everything about violence. They're wrong on both counts." With their ranch finances teetering on collapse, Wyatt and Lucy Smith, a pair of fiercely bonded twins, have no choice but...

"She walked into the building Black and walked out white. Their gaze had transformed her." They were light-skinned Black twin girls—Desiree the bold one, Stella the quiet one—in a small Louisiana town...

"Now dodging death seemed to be his life's main business, which boiled down to the story of his physical decline." The man in question has reached his final act. He built a successful career in advertising...

"Beyond good and evil there is a field. I'll meet you there." (Rumi, Persian poet) At this novel's heart are two young girls. Their names were Smadar and Abir, one fourteen, the other ten, one Israeli...

"He stopped at the thought that life was just a dance with death, that he'd rushed through spring and summer too fast and was already halfway through autumn. He really needed to get his act together because everyone knows...

"Any white person could claim your whole being for any reason whatsoever. Not just to work you, kill you, or maim you, but to dirty you. Dirty you so thoroughly you'd never be clean again..."