Juan Vidal

Anti-racist reading lists are making the rounds right now — and they can be useful if people do the work of reading. But critic Juan Vidal suggests you look closer to home, to your own bookshelf.

Mathias Énard's novel — newly translated from French — imagines what would have happened if Michelangelo had accepted an offer from the Ottoman ruler to design a bridge across the Golden Horn.

Marcia Douglas's new book imagines a resurrected Bob Marley, living in a clock tower and conversing with spirits — but Douglas also honors and elevates the voices of the women in Marley's orbit.

Small publishers and big indie powerhouses alike showcased international voices this year — we pick out a few of our favorites, from a bitter marriage drama to the memoirs of a polar bear family.

Jack London died 100 years ago this week, worn out from drink, disease and overwork — but he left behind a prolific body of work that considers the vast scope of human experience and suffering.

Ernest Hemingway's masterful first novel came out 90 years ago today; the story of aimless American expatriates drinking, fighting and falling in and out of love is regarded as one of his best works.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez's new novel centers on a respected and feared political cartoonist whose past comes back to haunt him after he receives a threatening letter. It's a powerful, concentrated work.

If you're tired of political competition, there's always athletic competition. And if your team stinks, we can offer sympathy and a selection of the year's best books about sports to ease the sting.

You might be forgiven for knowing only one Brazilian author — Paulo Coelho dominates the charts. But we've got five more great, overlooked Brazilian reads for you to kick off the Rio Games with.

Alejandro Zambra's playful new novel is fashioned in the format of Chile's Academic Aptitude Test, the standardized exam high school students there take — complete with multiple choice questions.

In Super Extra Grande, Cuban sci-fi author Yoss imagines a world where faster-than-light travel has brought humanity into contact with a vast array of strange and marvelous intergalactic creatures.

"The Louisville Lip" was famously as fast with his words as with his fists — years before the birth of hip hop, he was a battle rapper flipping similes and metaphors in a language all his own.

Alejandro Jodorowsky's hallucinatory new novel follows two women on the run — one suffering from a monstrous affliction. Though disturbing in places, it has the feel of an ancient fireside tale.

Returning to a book you've read before can feel like getting a drink with an old friend. But even though the book's the same, you yourself may have changed — and that's what makes rereading so rich.

I first came across the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald through his collection Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories. The slim volume, with its bright purple cover, called to me from the cluttered end cap of a secondhand bookshop. I cracked it open, sat, and read through ...

Oftentimes the most provocative stories are the ones that bridge the holy and the profane, that mesh the intellectual and the spiritual to arrive at a form of truth. And in fiction, as in life, truth can come in many forms.

In Sophia, the slim novel by Michael Bible, this ...

When I was 17, my mother sent me to live with some relatives in South America for a year. I'd been screwing up royally and my antics were becoming difficult for her to manage as a struggling single mother of three. She'd been threatening for a long time to ship ...

The past several years have seen something of a resurgence of European crime fiction in the United States. It's no secret that the genre is massive overseas, in Scandinavia and especially France, where roughly one in five books sold is a crime novel. The success of books like Alex, ...

The U.S. is in a frenzy over Pope Francis. And with the pontiff visiting Philadelphia on Saturday, vendors there are ready with commemorative memorabilia – including, as we've reported, a toaster that burns the pontiff's image onto bread.

That's all tongue in cheek, of course, but reports of people ...

Many writers have done some of their best work under threatening and even hostile circumstances: James Baldwin worked tirelessly during the tensions of the civil rights movement; Roberto Bolaño wrote his masterpiece 2666 under looming sickness and death. Joseph Roth, the Austrian journalist and novelist, sketched a portrait of his ...