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Political satire from John Lithgow? No one is more surprised than I. I’m a grizzled thespian, not much known for my politics, and pretty far along in life to head off in such a wildly different direction. But to my own amazement, my first ever book of political humor arrives hot off the presses this fall. How could this have happened? Well, the book probably would never have existed without the prodding of two confederates and without the occurrence of a single explosive moment onstage.

Have I made you curious? Good. Read on. Let me tell you the story of how, at the age of 73, I came to write Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse...

Come. Sit by the campfire with me.

I want to tell you a story.

A ghost story.

There may have been a few beforehand, and there were definitely hundreds after, but if I were to attempt to pinpoint the very first ghost story that rooted itself in my mind, that really burrowed under my skin like a tick and spread its bacteria-laden saliva throughout my subconscious so that I would carry its infectious narrative around with me for the rest of my life, well, then... that story would have to be none other than the terrifying tale of Tailypo...

Anyone interested in recent Latinx fiction should add Joseph Cassara’s glittery, gritty debut novel, The House of Impossible Beauties, to their to-be-read pile. A finalist for both the International Latino Book Award for Inspirational Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, The House is a novelistic expansion of the 1990 cult film Paris Is Burning, about Harlem drag ball culture. In particular, Cassara takes a close look at the Latinx House of Xtravaganza, the first Latinx-specific house in the Harlem ball scene.

The House of Impossible Beauties is set in 1980s New York City, and follows the lives of the House’s founders, the lightly fictionalized Angel and Hector Xtravaganza, and Angel’s retinue of LGBTQ+ youth, also based on real individuals...

Shortly after my mother died, the kids and I established the routine of taking long beach walks about an hour before sundown. We lived on Staten Island then, the long beautiful stretch of Great Kills beach was only seven minutes away by car. My husband and I had separated just a few months before my mother’s death, and all three of us were still reeling from these two blows. David was almost 18 then, Stephanie had just turned 15; I would look at our shadows and see that they were about the same lengths. We looked like three orphaned siblings rather than a mother and her kids...

It has long been rumored that Spanish author Javier Marías is a perennial presence on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and reading through his many novels, it’s easy to see why this elegant and reflective prose stylist would remain top of mind.

The prolific Marías began writing short stories in childhood, publishing his first novel, Los dominios del lobo, while in his teens. A polymath, Marías is also highly regarded as an English-to-Spanish translator, translating notoriously difficult material like Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which won him Spain’s National Prize for the Best Translation. For the last 34 years, Marías’s protagonists have been likewise preoccupied with translation, interpretation, and the keeping or cracking of secrets...

My husband, Bill, and I had a disagreement over the word broken. Was the faucet broken when it leaked?

I thought, yes.

He thought, no. If you turned the lever to just the right position, it no longer leaked. “See?” he said. “Not broken.”

This disagreement took a while. Tense voices.

“It is too.” I turned it to the off position. “See? Broken.” I held my finger under the steady drip, drip, drip.

“It is not.” He pulled it back to the not-leaking position. “See?” He opened his hand, like he made magic. No drip...

Alia Trabucco Zerán is a Chilean novelist, and holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the University College London. Her debut novel, The Remainder, is shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize; the original Spanish-language version, La Resta, was selected by El País as one of its Top Ten Debuts of 2015, and in 2014, won the prize for Best Unpublished Literary Work by the Chilean Council for the Arts.

The Remainder (trans. Sophie Hughes) is about three young Chileans trying to come to terms with their parents’ violent past under the Pinochet dictatorship. Taking up the themes of intergenerational trauma and the subjectivity of language and interpretation, the novel follows Iquela, a translator, her friend Felipe, and a German friend, Paloma...

“Books don’t matter to us. What matters is that our children don’t get enough to eat and get sick and die.”

I don’t remember exactly when Flor de Margarita Pérez Pérez said this to me, but I remember how it made me feel: that, as an anthropologist and writer, I had little to offer her and her community.

I arrived at Margarita’s house in Chenalhó, Chiapas, Mexico, in February 1987. Though I love to read, I had only brought a few books with me. While studying Tsotsil, my host family’s language, I would look up from my dictionary to the corn crib in the room and compare it to my bookshelf at home...

When 22 people died and 22 more were wounded in the city of El Paso, Texas, as a result of the mass shooting of a crazed racist on August 3 this year, something profoundly shifted in me. I was born and grew up in El Paso, my parents and two of my siblings and their children still live there, much of my work as a playwright draws inspiration from that city, and I have just had Retablos, a book of stories about my life along the border, published within the last year. I am largely defined by the frontera on which this American city stands. Yet, this tragedy is forcing me to question whether I am American enough for these times...

When I was recording the audiobook for my debut book, Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place, I happened to meet a professional audiobook reader who asked me a question that stuck with me. We were crowded into a makeshift dining area in a small nook of the recording studio, the team for my audiobook squeezed in alongside assorted staff and readers from other projects who were also taking their lunch breaks. It was such tight quarters I had to turn my whole body to make eye contact with the grey-haired gentleman beside me who was telling us about his career as an audiobook reader while he ate his sandwich out of a neatly packed Tupperware dish...