George Saunders’s Vigil is a kind of ars narrationis—the art of narration, if I may be bold enough to create this phrase—consummately plaiting often faulty human perceptions into a novel that examines the subject of storytelling itself, this deeply necessary, essentially human, pursuit.

The Natural Order of Things, Donika Kelly’s third collection of poems—after the acclaimed Bestiary and The Renunciations, both mesmerizing in their candor and tonality—extends her singular voice and clarity into insightful meditations of identity, ancestry, and joy.

Harryette Mullen’s incisive eye, linguistic prestidigitation and multilayered connections are in exceptional form in her new collection Regaining Unconsciousness.

Ayşegül Savaş’s distinctive ability to craft striking narratives from the quotidian lives of ordinary people is on full display in the baker’s dozen of stories in Long Distance, her first fiction publication since the deservedly-lauded novel The Anthropologists. A sumptuous short story collection—much like its poetic counterpart—creates a kind of omakase menu. Individual, perfectly composed dishes have both a visible and ephemeral connection with each other. With each reading of Long Distance, one might follow a different theme even as the collective offers a rumination on the many ways there are distances in our lives: literally across countries and languages, and emotionally between ourselves and others, between our past, current, and future selves, and between who we are, and who we might yet be.

What are the stories we must share with each other in order to endure, and persist? How do our rituals and litanies sustain us, even as our lives splinter off from the expectations of main roads? Doesn’t our despair shape our gratitude? As the following interview indicates, Ocean Vuong, like his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is full of multitudes, a talented novelist who is poetic to the depth of his double-helix.

Good Girl is a striking first novel by Aria Aber that effortlessly employs her innate poetic lyricism to examine all of these yearnings in a way that is distinctively articulated, yet universally resonant.

Have we evolved into different creatures from what we once were, with shorter attention spans, greater grievances, lonelier in tighter quarters? In this new edition, Rankine of today converses with Rankine of the nascent twenty-first century.