Fiction
The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino (2005)
This is one of those books that stays with you long after you finish it. The hit from Japanese mystery writer Keigo Higashino, who died last month, puts a dark twist on a story about loyalty and the obligations that come with it. This was my first interaction with Higashino’s famous “Detective Galileo.” Think of a police procedural wrapped in a shroud of mathematical philosophy. This book is a dark gem.
— Akela Lacy
Good People, Patmeena Sabit (2026)
It’s easy to be lulled into thinking this propulsive, polyphonic novel is a true crime beach read: The book opens with a disclaimer about police refusing to weigh in on an open investigation, followed by short vignettes that serve as witness testimonies to an unfolding crime narrative. But it’s actually a beautiful picture of community, family tragedy, and the court of public opinion, and a wonderful reminder that, despite the current political climate, we should be proud to be a nation of immigrants.
— Celine Piser
Questions 27 & 28, Karen Tei Yamashita (2026)
It’s become almost cliché in this era of wanton imprisonment of immigrants to invoke the incessant relevance of the United States’ WWII concentration camps for Japanese Americans, but Karen Tei Yamashita brings hundreds of new lives to one of the country’s most infamous domestic crimes. She once thought “that about ‘the camps,’ we’d been there, done that,” she writes in a postscript to Questions 27 & 28, “but as those who continue to research and write about these events know very well, it’s never done.” The questions that make up the novel’s title were the last two in an infamous loyalty questionnaire administered to incarcerees: The first asked if they would enlist in the Army for the same United States of America that had incarcerated them; the second if they would swear undying allegiance to the U.S. and forsake any ties to Japan. Between those two questions, “There are eight possible answers,” Yamashita writes, some of which would get you sent to war, others that would deepen your incarceration. “But or if answers are useless … it doesn’t matter what you think or believe; only your answers to 27 and 28 matter.”
In a rigorous history lesson coated in a fun, twisty work of fiction, Yamashita sets out to capture the varied political leanings and personal narratives that might lie behind a single checkbox marked yes or no or left blank. The novel — and it is one, despite being stuffed with historical figures who really lived through the incarceration — is multi-formatted and polyvocal, making use of the kind of staggeringly varied structure that has become something like Yamashita’s signature. It’s broken into three “boxes,” as if in a historical archive, which Yamashita plumbs for precisely reproduced documents and imagined conversations about how they came to be. With stories spanning more than a century, it grapples with the role of Japanese imperialism in constructing racial identity, the place for violence in politics, what it means to be a citizen of a state — and whether one that would lock people up over race or nationality is worth having at all.
— Maia Hibbett
The Vivisectors, Missouri Williams (2026)
I read a lot of contemporary fiction and have the scars to prove it. And, candidly, I haven’t even finished Williams’s sophomore novel, which takes place in a lightly dystopian college town being consumed by enemies both plant and animal. Let that make this endorsement all the more ringing: It’s truly rare that I slow my reading of a novel because I want to take in each sentence fully, and that I want to immediately start re-reading before I’ve even closed the hardcover. Williams is a sly, darkly funny observer of our world and what she imagines as the next. Jump on board now, or risk being left behind on one of literature’s up-and-coming voices.
— Katherine Krueger
The Full Catastrophe, David Carkeet (1990)
We often say a string of words in a very specific order that intentionally has no meaning. Or spit out a different combination of them that has the opposite meaning of what is spoken. Why is it hard to say what we want to really say?
A lovelorn, laid-off linguist who gets enraged by empty expressions like “Have a good one” and “We’ve come full circle” finds a new job at the Pillow Agency, run by the rich, eccentric, incomprehensible Mr. Pillow, a believer of love. The linguist is to embed (“occupy”) with an assigned couple at their home, listen to their verbal interactions, and analyze whether this marriage can be saved, despite his own lack of experience in the field of commitment. This is somehow not the premise of a couple’s therapy reality TV show today; it’s much funnier and less self-conscious! Perhaps because it published in 1990? I thought it was headed in a surreal “Being John Malkovich” direction at the start, but The Full Catastrophe author, David Carkeet, takes a more difficult path and, with serious honesty, tackles the later-stage, post-honeymoon relationship troubles — excavated down to their true awkwardness — that come from miscommunication. Brutal things get said and heard! Because of that, I was surprised by how romantic (and hilarious) this book is. Pairs well with Ross McElwee’s 1986 film “Sherman’s March.”
— Nara Shin
The Makioka Sisters, Jun’ichir? Tanizaki (1948)
This quiet, deeply thoughtful novel follows several years in the lives of four sisters in a once-prominent upper-middle-class family in a suburb between Kobe and Osaka in the late 1930s. The slowly building characterization of each sister’s personality and how she moves through the world is one of the most artfully realistic portraits of family life I’ve ever read.
While mostly focused on the relationship between the sisters, the novel takes place in the shadow of the impending world war, and in scattered moments throughout the book Tanizaki sketches a compelling depiction of people who — despite being otherwise caring, empathetic, and worldly — are reflexively loyal to a government that is, at the time of narration, actively committing unspeakable crimes abroad.
For fans of: Thomas Mann, Colm Tóibín, Elena Ferrante.
— Noah Hurowitz
The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (2017)
A great contrast from the Nolan movie, which simply regurgitates the male heroic stereotype — I think (I have not seen it).
— David Bralow
Nonfiction
The Kentucky Cave Wars, David Randolph Kem (2014)
Soliciting recommendations, our editor helpfully intoned that “It doesn’t have to be a nonfiction book about war!” So, naturally, this is a nonfiction book about war.
Beneath the gentle rolling hills of Kentucky are hundreds of both mapped and hitherto yet uncharted miles of labyrinthine subterranea which have wormed their way through hollowed limestone over queer aeons. Yet all is not sanguine in these netherworlds, the mirthful perusal of which has been rendered “quixotic” if one is attempting the maintenance of a fairly fairy tale vernacular (or “illegal,” if one is not) through the corrosive joint forces of State and Capital, which seep hideously into the ground, oozing from the words and deeds of those who have no business being alive.
And so, we have the Kentucky Cave Wars, wherein to stop people from killing one another over rival private cave enterprises, the government stepped in and closed off miles of caverns under the standard doublespeak veneer of ostensibly opening them up under the hollow promises of a cavernous national park. This is America, land of the free, where entry into cave systems now requires government permission.
The real losers of the cave wars weren’t manipulative businessmen, who were arguably already losers by simple clear cut reason of being businessmen in the first place; no, they were those of us who were imprisoned in the outer realm by the unbridled malignity that is the National Park Service, condemned to beg for entry into the Earth on which we live, and into which we die.
— Nikita Mazurov
Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li (2025)
“Grieving mother’s resilience in the face of repeated tragedy” doesn’t feel quite right here. While I hesitate to call the word “resilience” trite, the way Yiyun Li narrates the process through which she navigates her two sons’ deaths makes me feel like the word does not encompass enough — that living through Terrible Things necessitates a kind of self-justification, but also doubt, denial, and optimism, that threatens the living and spurs it on. Things in nature do merely grow, and they’ll develop based on different external conditions. But their interiority, we’ll never know.
— Fei Liu
Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing, Molly Gebrian (2024)
Some really interesting discussion that is applicable to everything we do.
— David Bralow
Double Eagle, Charles McCarry (1979)
A chronicle of the first successful balloon journey across the Atlantic. Previous attempts claimed five lives. Written in 1970s magazine style with occasional odd asides about the crew’s marriages, it’s a fascinating tale of rich men determined to do the impossible for no particular reason.
— Matt Sledge
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey (launched October 2018)
Fair warning: Host Andrew Hickey is the kind of obsessive cataloguer of popular culture who never met a parenthetical — say, about the session drummer’s later production credits — that wasn’t worthy of explication. So while I can’t recommend this podcast for the kind of casual half-listening that the medium often invites, I can promise that your attention to detail will be well rewarded.
Over and over again, Hickey offers a helpful corrective to the various mythologies of early rock ’n’ roll, especially by later (mostly white) critics who have policed genre boundaries and exalted a narrow range of guitar gods and studio auteurs. From the beginning, he is careful to emphasize the communal and collaborative nature of musical production, drawing attention to figures who’ve been marginalized in other histories. Along the way, he smuggles in some fascinating lessons in social history, political economy, and even music theory.
— Michael Sherrard
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan (2021)
It is incredibly well-written and easy to read. The book grapples with the realities of gender, class, race, and politics in really thought-provoking ways.
— Jessica Washington
Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution, Anand Gopal (2026)
Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria, Loubna Mrie (2024)
The constant onslaught of news these days can make us forget that, just a decade and a half ago, the Middle East and North Africa were rocked by a series of uprisings and revolutions that changed the face of the region. Perhaps none was more consequential than Syria’s eventually successful revolution, and yet so few people have an in-depth understanding of the circumstances. If the old saw about being doomed to repeat history holds true, we would do well to educate ourselves, to better understand the pitfalls and potentials of our paths. That’s where two new books from Anand Gopal and Loubna Mrie come in.
Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage traces the story of the Syrian Civil War through the eyes of the mid-sized city of Manbij. A masterwork of literary reporting, Gopal’s hearty volume recounts the waves of political power that swept over the city — a revolutionary movement, a more neoliberal city council, the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic State group, and so on — with Gopal deftly reporting out intimate views of each, provided by those who fought for, against, or simply lived through them.
Loubna Mrie’s striking memoir about the war, Defiance, provides the one view Gopal doesn’t go deep on: Syria’s ruling Alawite sect. Neither does Mrie, however, provide a straight-ahead understanding of the regime that controlled the country for more than half a century. Instead, it provides a window into that world precisely by departing from it. Mrie’s family was firmly in the pro-regime fold, but her observations, empathy, and intellect quickly led her to become a revolutionary. What follows from there is a harrowing personal journey whose contours are best left to Mrie herself, who lets the reader so far into her travails and inner life that it feels almost intrusive to keep reading — but also makes it impossible to stop.
— Ali Gharib
Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple (2026)
At this point it is perhaps redundant to recommend this extraordinary, beautifully written history of the Jewish Labor Bund, by friend-of-The-Intercept, Molly Crabapple. But for those who have yet to read it, I couldn’t recommend a book more highly. Molly offers us a gift: richly rendered revolutionary characters, rigorously researched history, and a corrective to Jewish historical narratives that treat Zionism as transhistorical and inevitable. Here’s to Molly!
— Natasha Lennard
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1977)
I first read German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey about 20 years after it was published. My mind wasn’t blown. It was blown up.
I suspect that almost 50 years after it was published, the book still packs a formidable punch. Every page seemed to be a revelation, drawing on myriad sources from 19th century philosophy, sociology, psychology, literature, physics, medicine, and, seemingly, everything else. The volume was slim, but it seemed to be packed with more startling information than any three great books. It wasn’t a history of train travel, it was an exploration of modernity and an explanation of how human perceptions of distance, time, space, speed, personal autonomy, psychological integrity, and physical trauma were shattered and remade by the advent of railway travel, creating a new “industrialized consciousness.”
Much of The Railway Journey now exists as a blur in my mind, much like the sheer speed of the train fundamentally changed how people experienced the landscape, forcing passengers to focus only on distant vistas and transforming what had been an immersive experience in nature to a series of (window-)framed, here and gone, two-dimensional images of a panoramic landscape. But for all that I’ve forgotten of the book, for every fact that has long since fled my mind, I have never looked at the world in the same way again.
“The notion that the railroad annihilated space and time was not related to that expansion of space that resulted from the incorporation of new spaces into the transport network,” Schivelbusch observed. “What was experienced as being annihilated was the traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology.” Travelers had, that is, experienced the physical space between cities as a “living entity” and had been embedded in that landscape before the train obliterated such “travel space.” Schivelbusch called on 19th-century poet and writer Heinrich Heine to explain the incredible disorientation experienced by early train travelers. Without The Railway Journey, I would probably have been ignorant of the existence of Heine (and so many other forgotten thinkers past). But I’d pick up a copy of the book for Heine’s commentary on the opening of railway lines from Paris to Rouen and Orléans in 1843, alone:
What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone. … Now you can travel to Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.
— Nick Turse
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