Few poets are as plain as Cesare Pavese—and few as difficult to carry from Italian into English. His poems march with prosaic clarity, yet beneath them runs a pulse of reflection on history and culture, transfigured . . .

Almost one hundred years ago, Arshile Gorky sat down in his New York City studio to paint a moment from childhood. In the resulting image, based on a photograph taken of the artist and his mother before they fled . . .

Early in Juan Cárdenas’s novel The Devil of the Provinces, a student asks the book’s protagonist, known only as “the biologist,” if God endows every living being with its own special purpose.

Dear Fady, […] haunts me. It has haunted me since I first read it, bending over my desk near midnight, bathed in the amber glow of my lamp, and beside me, a cold, forgotten cup of cinnamon tea.

The chapbook Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England—by Danielle Legros Georges, former poet laureate of Boston . . . —is set in a time of revolution, harnessing from that era a spirit of lightness while speaking, as the title says, of Africans’ resistance.

Under the stewardship of Reviews Editor Rachel Mennies, we’re looking for roughly 1,500-to-3,000-word review essays that lift us to your singular inquiry-driven vantage: show us what your chosen book reveals to you that only you can show. Begin new conversations; bring us along for your investigations . . .