The lure of beautiful beaches might make the Dominican Republic among the most popular tourist destinations in the Caribbean, but the ghosts of its troubled history, as captured in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, stalk the living.
In Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society, philosopher Daniel S. Milo argues that science and society have overemphasized Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection
Seth's inspiration for the epic story, Clyde Fans, grew from an empty storefront and photographs of two middle-aged men; thus it is imbued with palpable sadness and regret.
If happiness usually proves duplicitous, and melancholy a dependable constant, then the journey of an epic Joyce Carol Oates novel is always going to be a trip worth experiencing, as with My Life As a Rat.
Julián Herbert's The House of the Pain of Others is a masterly study that sheds light on the role played by educated elites in fomenting genocide.
When order ruptures it leads to a state of crisis manifest in many ways, as we see emerging throughout the world. What can we do?
Socialists need to do better in fighting against identity-based discrimination, as editor of Jacobin Bhaskar Sunkara notes in The Socialist Manifesto, but that struggle will only be effective if waged as part of a larger struggle against neoliberal capitalism.
Yannick Haenel's Hold Fast Your Crown is shocking, frustrating, elating, and among the best books published in France for decades.
In her history of women in punk music, Revenge of the She-Punks, Vivien Goldman hefts the scene's virtues and the vices into one heap and concludes that some of it was necessary, some of it was fun, and some of it was evil.
Posthumous work by celebrated Japanese author Yukio Mishima, Star, explores how celebrities struggle with their own lack of authenticity.
Language and image never combine in Abrams' Live Oak, with Moss; they are distant lovers, if you will, as divided as Walt Whitman and Brian Selznick are as collaborators.
With his second collection of short stories, Exhalation, master of existential science fiction Ted Chiang explores AI, time travel, and alternate realities with the studious eye of an anthropologist.
Where does one draw the line between conspiracy theories, and politics-as-usual? Anthropologist Erica Lagalisse warns that we ignore conspiracy theory at our peril in Occult Features of Anarchism.
Article 353 is Tanguy Viel's politically charged, darkly atmospheric, and cathartic indictment of neoliberal capitalism.
Japanese poet Toriko Takarabe grew up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and lived to tell the harrowing tale.
Mystery and discovery in Hugo Award-winning novelist Elizabeth Bear's latest work, Ancestral Night, initially hooks but it's the speculative and complex world she constructs that's most rewarding.
The lovely cadences in Summer Brennan's High Heel stack up like so many sand castles that sift iconic examples of high heels into a finely grained pile of pros and cons that each reader will sift through quite differently.
Altman's Images is a complex, haunting and always disturbing film about the slow realization that one's sanity is a stake.
The esteemed oral historian, Timuel Black, turns the microphone around to capture his amazing journey through 20th Century black America in Sacred Ground.
How do we measure the status of a performer's Holy Grail like the Apollo Theater in 2019? Ted Fox and James Otis Smith's beautifully realized, updated graphic history brings this rich history to life.
In After Certainty, Robert Pasnau constructs a history of knowledge and concludes that most theories of knowledge aren't up to par. But, he says, we can hope.
In Go Ahead in the Rain, Hanif Abdurraqib blends his talents as both culture critic and personal essayist for a meditation on perhaps the most influential hip-hop group from the genre's sample-laden boom-bap era, A Tribe Called Quest.
Paul Crenshaw's This One Will Hurt You, a PopMatters' Pick, is powerful essay collection about life, loss, faith, and natural (and man-made) violence in rural America.
In graphic novel Belonging, Nora Krug takes a single idea – her family's involvement in the Second World War and Nazi Germany – and pursues it with relentless, forensic determination.
Short story collection You Know You Want This, a PopMatters' Pick, brings forth a dozen brilliant and beautifully unapologetic dark visions from fearless new writer, Kristen Roupenian.
Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus is iconically and almost ethereally beautiful. It's a full-blooded, complex melodrama of the highest order.
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