Sarah M. Broom’s debut book The Yellow House reads like a multifaceted map, not just of a place but an expanse of time, marking both relationships and absences. Part scrapbook and part oral history, it is an expertly curated museum exhibit of Broom’s family history. It is also a portrait of New Orleans East across the last 100 years.

“These [essays] are the prisms through which I have come to know myself. In this book, I tried to undo their acts of refraction. I wanted to see the way I would see in a mirror. It’s possible I painted an elaborate mural instead.”

Julian Rosefeldt’s thirteen-part film installation, Manifesto, is situated at the approximate midpoint of the Hirshhorn’s Manifesto: Art x Agency exhibition which comprises the entire outer ring of the museum’s second floor, serving to bridge early twentieth-century manifesto-catalyzed art—futurism, surrealism, constructivism, and lyrical abstraction—with political art that speaks more specifically to contemporary concerns. It thus acts as a synecdoche of the attempt by the exhibition—and by manifestos in general—to taxonomize the breadth of history and the diversity of individual expression. The ways in which the installation subverts these tendencies make the two-hour journey one of the most compelling artistic confrontations in my recent experience, both on intellectual and sensory levels.

“All the boys knew about that rotten spot,” describes the narrator of The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s searing novel set in Jim Crow-era Florida. The boys, students of Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory, are just that—boys, kids, those who were “tied up in a potato sack and dumped.”

In April, I attended Memoir Night at Franklin Park, an indoor/outdoor bar in Crown Heights that hosts a reading series on the second Monday of each month. I made the hour-long journey from Harlem to listen to Kiese Laymon and Mitchell Jackson read from their memoirs Heavy and Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family. Also on the bill was Mira Jacob, a writer I did not know. Her book Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations was published a few days before the event, and I didn’t know what to expect when she took her stand at the microphone while the Franklin Park crew cued up a projector.

Sylvie, the titular character of Jean Kwok’s third novel, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, a girl who learns her manners from etiquette books and studies designer brands as intently as her statistics textbooks. During her childhood, she lives with relatives in the Netherlands for nine years because her parents cannot afford to take care of her at home in Queens. Now in her thirties, Sylvie is married to an old-money husband and works as a management consultant. Her younger sister, Amy, envies her—for her elegant hips, her degrees from Princeton and MIT and Harvard, her even-keeled mind—and views herself as an “afterthought,” far from the spectacular path of assimilation even as she dreams of being a teacher. Awkward, bookish, and prone to falling in love with strangers, Amy is easily the novel’s most likable character.

On September 22nd, 2010, a student from Rutgers University logged onto Facebook and wrote what would later become the most widely read suicide note of all time:

“Our mothers are our first homes,” writes Michele Filgate in the title essay of a new collection she edited, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence. The mother’s body is also the site of the first tragedy, the instant when we are torn from the nurturing safety of the womb and sent into the loneliness that we will never escape. It is no wonder that the image of the mother resonates throughout history with both pleasure and pain, with love and longing. It is no wonder that this collection of essays about mother-child relationships, written by contemporary authors who are diverse in age and race, gender and sexual orientation, socio-economic status and writing style, can touch every reader.

There are many Frida Kahlos inside the Brooklyn Museum’s Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving. There is a diminutive Asian girl with a crown of braids, dressed in a long red skirt and embroidered blouse. There is a tall blond man with fine penciled unibrow, a headband with enormous flowers, red kitten heels. Kahlo stretches across T-shirts of little girls on tiptoes, across bags, phone cases, the red painted lips of gallery-goers and the flowers in their hair.

“It’s better for a star to never be around,” says Rikio Mizuno, the narrator of Yukio Mishima’s 1961 short novel Star (recently translated by Sam Bett for New Directions Press). “Absence is his forte,” he concludes. At twenty-four years old, Rikio has reached the height of his movie acting career. Young fans surround him on set. They idolize him, dress like him, mirror him. He finds them all disgusting, though he cannot find himself, despite appearing everywhere from press releases to the life-sized posters he plasters to the outside of his bedroom door. Celebrity has taken over his life. The entertainment bosses who hire and direct him have, in collaboration with the endless fans, agreed on who and what is: a bad-boy yakuza on screen, who in reality is an innocent heartthrob. His public life is controlled by this latter narrative, such that even when musing out loud about suicide, his assistant instructs him to make sure it looks like an accident if ever he decides to go through with it. An innocent heartthrob, after all, loves life, and never thinks of leaving this world.

“Is it normal to be ashamed of loving?” asks Édouard Louis in his third intensely autobiographical novel, Who Killed My Father. This searing short work, with its conspicuously declarative title, turns around questions that aren’t quite questions, and answers that are bold politically driven accusations. It opens with the speaker—who, as we know from interviews, is Louis himself—paying a visit to his father in the northern French village of his childhood after several years of separation. Yes, his father is still alive, but Louis argues that a lifetime of poverty, manual labor, malnourishment, and lack of education condemned him to an early death at barely 50 years old. Using fragments and scenes, Louis sketches an urgent, yet intimate, portrait of his father, who we learn is the “you” throughout the book. The detail is excruciating: His belly has been “torn apart by its own weight” and his heart “can’t beat without assistance, without the help of a machine. It doesn’t want to.”

Damon Krukowski’s Ways of Hearing is an ear-opener. Based on the podcast of the same name from Radiotopia, the book is a multimodal experience, one that opens the ears through the eyes.

In late 2013, nineteen-year-old Ayan and sixteen-year-old Leila abruptly departed their adopted home of Norway to join the Syrian jihad. They are the daughters of Somali immigrants Sadiq and Sara, and in Two Sisters, Åsne Seierstad tracks the devastation the family suffers in the wake of their departure and looks back in time to examine how two young women could become radicalized.

Whether you are a lover of Korean literature or someone entirely unfamiliar it, Heinz Insu Fenkl’s new translation of Kim Man-Jung’s 17th-century masterpiece The Nine Cloud Dream, recently published by Penguin, will be a revelation. Unlike earlier translators, such as James Scarth Gale and Richard Rutt, Fenkl attempts to recreate the experience of the novel’s first readers. This approach is fraught with difficulties because The Nine Cloud Dream, Korea’s most famous and best-loved work, was set in the China of almost a millennium before its composition and written in Chinese. According to the translator, that makes his task analogous to translating a 19th-century Russian work set in medieval France and written in Old French.

“This is my skin. This is not your skin, yet you are still under it.” – Iain Thomas

Jean Fremon’s latest work, Now, Now, Louison, translated beautifully from the French by Cole Swensen, could be described as a new possible answer to an ethical problem long-debated and long-agonized over by conscientious writers of fiction and nonfiction alike: what gives someone the authority to write about a real person? And, following that: what happens when you write about someone you love and admire, and give them a sort of second life in the written word? How much of this authority is real? How much is imagined?

In her debut memoir Mother Winter, writer Sophia Shalmiyev takes the reader through her experience growing up in the Soviet Union with an alcoholic mother and her subsequent search for replacement mother figures upon her move to the United States when she is relocated by her father in 1990 at the age of eleven. A story of love and loss, searching and mourning, Shalmiyev’s journey climaxes as she realizes that the mother she is looking for is not someone she can find— rather “motherhood” is an exploration she’ll have to make herself.

Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work is a masterpiece. Set during the Syrian Civil War, the novel chronicles three siblings who seek to honor the dying wish of their father: to be buried in his hometown of Anabiya next to his sister, Layla.

“My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland,” begins Nora, one of the many narrators from Laila Lalami’s new novel, The Other Americans. It’s the event that shapes the novel, establishing the foundation for a story that reflects on the hollowness of grief, the weight of secrets, the challenges of family, and the meaning of home.

T. Fleischmann’s essay, Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through, is a balancing act of various genres. It’s non-fiction piled on top of an art critique balanced on photographs and spun around by poetry. The narrative, however, keeps a consistent thread of hunger and searching that is never frustrating and always disarming. The author’s quest to assert their existence and their right to belong brushes against questions of love and loss, violence and courage, gender and sexuality, art and perception.