The media landscape is awash with concerns about threats to contemporary democracy. Political commentary rightly speaks to very troubling political shifts: President Donald Trump’s undermining of liberal institutions; concerns over Russian election interference; Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s upending of liberal democracy; Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s fascistic agenda; right-wing populism’s rise across the West, and more. But media commentary often takes for granted that our imperiled democracies are the form of political life we should be upholding and defending, rather than interrogating. All too often, it is assumed that we have a state of democracy (which is under threat)

T Kira Madden grew up queer and biracial in Boca Raton, Florida, the only child of parents battling drug and alcohol addictions. In her widely-lauded debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, she details her coming-of-age and her search, admist such volatile circumstances, for connection and stability. She often finds those things—or semblances of them—in unlikely places. The first few pages of the memoir find Madden befriending the J.C. Penney jewelry mannequin her mother sets up in their living room to ward off intruders, naming him “Uncle Nuke.” She twists off his plastic hand, keeps it in

Valeria Luiselli Valeria Luiselli began volunteering as a translator for children in immigration court around five years ago. Drawing on that work, and the activism that followed, she wrote two books: Tell Me How It Ends, an extended essay based on the questionnaire used to interview the children, and her latest, Lost Children Archive (Knopf, $28), a novel about a family traveling by car from New York City to Arizona so that the father, an audio documentarian, can work on a project about the Chiricahua Apache. During the trip, the mother becomes obsessed with news on the radio of

One of our most unerring critics, A. S. Hamrah is a soothsayer, a sidesplitter, a crank, and a moralist. His reviews linger wherever his attention is drawn, whether on or off screen: in the prosthetic hand worn by Jessica Biel over a prop stump for a shlocktale about American veterans, he presents a withering metaphor for Hollywood’s political cowardice; a missed screening prompts him to write an unmissable tale about the indignities weathered by reviewers. He has previewed films he will not see, and covered others without once mentioning character, plot, or star. With his collection The Earth Dies

Keith Gessen’s timely and hilarious new novel, A Terrible Country, arrives ten years after his first, All the Sad Young Literary Men. The story follows Andrei Kaplan, an overeducated, underemployed young academic as he relocates to Moscow to look after his sick grandmother in the summer of 2008. Over the course of the year, Andrei cares for his grandmother, plays hockey, befriends revolutionaries, and falls in love. I spoke with Gessen on a hot summer afternoon in the Greene Acres Community Garden in Brooklyn in the presence of many mosquitos and at least one cooped chicken. Was there a

The word essay comes from a French word meaning “to try.” But thinking of an essay as simply an exploratory effort diminishes the form’s deep tradition—one worthy of serious study. With his debut collection, Up Up, Down Down, Cheston Knapp exhibits both a studied mastery of the form and a reverence for its artistry. In his capacious works, Knapp seamlessly weaves seemingly disparate topics. In one essay, he studies the performative nature of professional wrestling alongside memories of a fraught father-son relationship. In another, he scrutinizes both UFO fanatics and his own relationship with Christianity. Knapp excavates the literary

Porochista Khakpour’s memoir, Sick, is a deeply powerful and harrowing odyssey through the most profound mysteries of mind and body, as Khakpour explores the roots of a chronic illness that has no clear beginning or end. I was already a great fan of Khakpour’s dazzling novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion, in addition to her essays, and Sick cements her reputation as one of our most vital writers working today. We conducted this interview over e-mail in April and May of 2018. We’re both novelists and to me the start of a novel feels generated

Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that in representational writing, “one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature . . . and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” In Wayne Koestenbaum’s “trance journals”—The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and the newly released Camp Marmalade—both the frame and the off-frame are folded into his trans-perspectival impressions. Camp Marmalade deep-focuses on the color orange, but like the best procedural works, the tangents are as crucial as the concept. References kaleidoscopically come together with edge-by-edge precision. In one breath, juxtaposing opera stars with avant-garde artists