In Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah presents us with a dystopia that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem too removed from our reality (schools push drugs on children to make them happy, people go to amusement parks to enact shootings, a white man gets acquitted of murdering five African American children on the basis of self-defense). It’s more like this dysfunctional scenario is a couple of decades into the future. Yet the stories are charming and caustic, memorable because they are full of sharp characters who are aware that their world is upside down. In the presence of the absurd, they question themselves and come up with the answer, ‘It’s not me, it’s you.’

Crime novels are often just entry points to examining culture and society. In a tense, concentrated form, mysteries give writers the perfect excuse to look beyond the illusions of an orderly reality and, by following a determined system, can gracefully and entertainingly peel back layers of deception to find real revelations about our lives and ourselves. Mystery novelist Tana French is no exception to this rule, but in The Witch Elm she has provided readers with something that feels quite new.

If good creative writing sparks the instinct to write, The Shell Game provides ample embers to inspire a wide range of writers. Edited by Kim Adrian with a foreword by Brenda Miller, this new anthology published by The University of Nebraska Press is devoted to a type of nonfiction called the hermit crab essay. The hermit crab essay is a work whose form embodies the content in bold, literal, and symbiotic ways. (Think: an essay on accomplishments organized as a resume, a meditation on the daily grind written as a to-do list, etc.) When pondering this particular approach, where a lyric essay “borrows” another form to tell its story, Adrian muses that a hermit crab essay’s formal, often bizarre looking exterior can allow it to “exert its full magic, tempting one’s inner aesthete with its very oddness, forcing upon its readers a private debate: Is this a thing of beauty? An ingenious expression of the human imagination? Or a cop out?”

As I was reading ​Deviation​, Anne Milano Appel’s English translation of Luce D’Eramo’s 1979 novel, I found myself increasingly surprised at the relatively minor position to which Luce D’Eramo and her masterful book have been relegated in the Italian literary canon. The novel is, on the surface level, formally straightforward, consisting of four parts that are each clearly connected to D’Eramo’s biography: her life working in a labor camp as a fervently Fascist volunteer, a political reawakening that leads to her internment in a concentration camp, and ultimately the process of learning how to navigate postwar life in the wake of wartime injuries that left her paralyzed. D’Eramo weaves these episodes together with meditations on memory and self-perception in life-writing as she unpacks the shift from her original Fascist ideology, connected to her bourgeois origins, to the eye-opening experiences of life in the camps.

Kate Atkinson’s inspiration for her latest novel Transcription initially came from a document released by the National Archives detailing the work of a WW2 agent known as “Jack King.” “Jack” was Eric Roberts, an outwardly pedestrian bank clerk who, in secret, worked for MI5 to infiltrate Fascist circles. He had posed as a Gestapo agent during the war, renting an apartment where he would meet regularly with British Fascists and various sympathizers who confided in Roberts with nefarious plots and plans. These meetings were then transcribed into documents over a hundred pages for the records of British intelligence. The technology for recording was not as advanced as it is now; there were, one could imagine, many gaps in the conversation that needed to be filled in.

Barry Cohen is on the lam. Multi-billionaire hedge-fund capitalist, collector of expensive watches, and engineer of the intricate mechanisms that trap him in his tony, Manhattan penthouse life — Barry packs his favorite timepieces into a rollerboard and absconds in the middle of the night. Ditching his credit cards, his wallet, all that ties him to his tremendous wealth, he boards a Greyhound bus headed for a college ex-girlfriend in Richmond, Virginia. Wife Seema is in the rearview, along with their son, Shiva, struggling with seemingly low-functioning autism in a world that barely forgives imperfections. A grain of sand in the clockwork of 1-percenter privilege.

How does a writer ethically engage with a story of trauma—specifically the trauma of a Syrian refugee family—in his work? How is that task complicated by writing a book for “readers of all ages,” encompassing, in that broad category, children who may not have yet faced the topic of the Syrian refugee crisis? In reading Khaled Hosseini’s latest book, Sea Prayer, we can glean the answers to these questions.

I first read Rebecca Solnit in San Rafael, just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. It’s the perfect place to read her: San Francisco is a place she currently calls home and the Bay Area has influenced her writing since at least her days as a graduate student in journalism at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s. At the behest of my boss, I read her seminal feminist essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” on my work computer. It was from this piece that the term “mansplaining” was spawned, though Solnit herself didn’t coin it. To write an essay which rings true to so many individuals’ experience as to popularize a new word is a feat, and Solnit has already accomplished it.

Poetry and death have always had a close, paradoxical relationship. The death of poetry, the poetry of death, the Dead Poets Society: what are these phrases if not elegant misnomers? Poetry, after all, is so life affirming, so full of beauty and truth, isn’t it? The further we wade into these texts, and the poets behind them, the more we come to realize, suddenly, that poetry cannot save us from our own demise. Almost all poems confront the end, whether explicitly or not. The only remaining question is: how?